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PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS

How to get tickets for the Paris Paralympics

If you were bowled over by the beauty of the Paris Olympics but missed out on getting tickets or were put off by high prices, then now is your chance. The Paralympics start in two weeks, using the same stunning venues with tickets still available from €15.

Published: 12 August 2024 10:53 CEST
Updated: 15 August 2024 08:19 CEST
How to get tickets for the Paris Paralympics
The Palace of Versailles will again be a Games venue during the Paralympics. Photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP

Few could argue that the Paris Olympics weren’t spectacular – in particular with regard to the beautiful venues. From beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower to fencing inside the Grand Palais, equestrian events in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles to urban sports in the Place de la Concorde, the Games had a strong look.

The Olympics are now over, but there is a second chance to experience all of those beautiful venues in person – at the Paralympics which start in two weeks.

Games organisers are keeping the temporary venues which have been set up around the city and Paralympics events will be staged largely in the same venues as the Olympics – including the more traditional sporting venues such as the Stade de France, which will host para athletics. 

And the good news is that tickets are still available and start from €15. Meanwhile for those outside Paris, prices for accommodation and travel have dropped to seasonal norms – making a last-minute Paris trip feasible for some.

Tickets 

Tickets are sold on the same platform as Olympics tickets – HERE – and the process is the same – buy tickets online and then download the Paris 2024 Tickets app to receive the ticket. As with the Olympics, there is no option for paper tickets. 

How to use the Olympics and Paralympics app

There is also the official resale platform – HERE – allowing people to sell tickets that they no longer want or cannot use.

Tickets for the Paralympics start at €15 with half of all tickets on sale for €25 or less. Tickets for event finals range from €20 to €100.

As of Saturday, around half of the 2.8 million tickets on offer have been sold, meaning that there are plenty of available seats even for the most popular events such as wheelchair basketball and the athletics events.

Dates

The Paralympics begin on Wednesday, August 28th and run until Sunday, September 8th.

The opening ceremony is at 8pm on August 28th – like the Olympics this will be held in the city centre, not a stadium, although this time there will be no river parade. Instead the athletes will parade down the Champs-Elysées and into Place de la Concorde.

The ceremony itself has been designed by Thomas Jolly – who also did the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies – so expect the unexpected.

Events 

Paralympic events follow largely the same pattern as the Olympics with various adaptations of the sports eg basketball becomes wheelchair basketball, volleyball becomes sitting volleyball.

The other difference is the event classifications according to level of disability, meaning that instead of one men’s 100m final there are several according to level of disability eg single-leg amputee, double leg-amputee etc.

As with the Olympics, the marathon and cycling road races will be held on a course going through the city for which no tickets are required – you can just go along and watch as the races come through your neighbourhood.

Fan zones

The Olympic fan zones will also largely be staying in place ready for the Paralympics, with the exception of the Trocadéro fan zone, which closes. Instead a selection of winning athletes will parade each day at the La Villette fan park.

Other fan zones will keep their big screens, entertainment and food and drink offerings.

MAP Where to find the free fan zones

Travel

Wondering if you could afford a trip to Paris for the Games? Well we’re not going to pretend that Paris is a cheap city, but travel websites are mostly listing prices during the Paralympics as at or even slightly below seasonal averages.

The hotel booking website kayak is offering hotels from around €100 a night (for a double or twin room) while Booking.com is offering hotels from around €100 a night and apartments at slightly less. Meanwhile Airbnb is listing apartments or studios that sleep two people from €65 a night.

When it comes to travel, prices are again looking about average for the season – if you’re happy to travel on a weekday Eurostar has tickets for €73 per person going from London, while Easyjet is offering outbound flights from €75 from London, returns from €35.

Flying from the US is naturally more expensive, but here too prices are within seasonal norms, with Skyscanner offering flights from New York from €500.

Go on, you know you want to . . .

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PARIS

Paris and Milan judged closest in the world to becoming ’15-minute cities’

Paris and Milan are among the cities closest to reaching the urban planning goal of being a "15-minute city," while car-dependent metropolises in the United States and elsewhere lag behind, a worldwide analysis said on Monday.

Published: 16 September 2024 17:29 CEST
Paris and Milan judged closest in the world to becoming '15-minute cities'

In fact, the central areas of many cities already meet the definition of a 15 minute-city, which means that residents are within a quarter-hour walk or bike ride from everything they need to a lead a good life, the analysis found.

But even within a city, there are often stark differences between the wealthy inner cities and the urban sprawl on their outskirts, according to the Italian researchers behind the new study.

The concept of the 15-minute city gained traction during the Covid pandemic, when lockdowns put more focus on local neighbourhoods.

It has since been embraced by dozens of mayors around the world — and become the target of conspiracy theorists online.

For the new study, published in the journal Nature Cities, the researchers built an online database looking at roughly 10,000 cities globally.

They used open source data to map out how far of a walk or cycle residents were from different services, including shops, restaurants, education, exercise and healthcare.

“A lot of people already live in a 15-minute city,” study co-author Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo told AFP.

But it depends on where you look within a city, he said, because of the inequality in access to services between the centre and periphery.

No ‘utopia’

What is clear, the researchers noted, is that population density is a crucial factor — if enough people are living close enough to each other, it is much easier for them to have easy access to services.

This meant that somewhat smaller yet relatively dense cities such as Italy’s Milan or Spain’s Barcelona scored well on their map, which was made available online.

When it came to the biggest cities, “Paris is an outlier,” lead study author Matteo Bruno told AFP.

The mayor of Paris embraced the concept in 2020, and a “considerable fraction” of the city is below the 15-minute mark, the study said.

Some European cities have a head start because they were built centuries ago at a time before cars — when basically all towns had to be 15-minute cities, the researchers said.

Cities built more recently with cars specifically in mind — particularly in the United States — fared far less well on the map.

Atlanta in particular stood out as being a long way from being a 15-minute city. Future Olympic host Los Angeles also lagged behind most others for walkability, as did several Chinese cities including Chongqing.

But when it comes to cities, there are always trade-offs — and there is no single right answer, the researchers said.

“The 15-minute city is often presented as a utopia — it’s not,” Bruno said.

Americans in sprawled-out cities usually have their own houses and backyards, while Europeans in densely populated cities tend to live in apartments, illustrating the important role played by culture, Bruno said.

And central parts of US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee were under the 15-minute threshold.

“Manhattan is definitely one of the most 15-minute places ever in the world,” said Bruno, a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome.

‘Conspiracy mongers’

There has been confusion about the concept in the past, the researchers lamented.

For example, “traffic has nothing to do with the 15-minute city,” Bruno said.

In fact, slow traffic could indicate an area is more pedestrian friendly, he added.

Yet it was new “low-traffic zones” in the UK that turned the ire of conspiracy theorists towards 15-minute city proponents.

Confusing the two ideas, online groups including vaccine and climate sceptics falsely claimed that 15-minute cities were part of a secret plot to restrict the movement of citizens.

The Italian researchers, who have themselves been targeted by “Twitter haters,” emphasised that nothing about the 15-minute city concept involves confining anyone.

Researcher Carlos Moreno, a high-profile proponent of 15-minute cities who has advised Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was also “attacked by the worldwide conspiracy mongers,” he told AFP.

Moreno welcomed the new study, praising how the idea had swiftly become a topic of interest for researchers around the world.

Just last week, Valerie Pecresse, the right-wing head of the greater Paris Ile-de-France area, presented a plan for a 20-minute region, he pointed out.

Bruno said that the 15-minute metric is just one element in the “recipe” that makes a good city.

Other parts of the recipe include tackling inequality and segregation, improving public transport, reducing traffic and so on, he said.

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