The Paris Olympics have been designed to showcase the City of Light in all its splendour, with many events set to take place at some of its most iconic locations. These five sites – including one outside the French capital – are among those likely to wow ticket-holders, and a global TV audience of billions, during the 17-day sporting extravaganza that starts on July 26: The action will take place in a temporary venue near the foot of the “Iron Lady”. The Champ de Mars park at the foot of the tower will host judo and wrestling.
Reviled by Parisians when it was unveiled in 1889 for the Paris Exhibition world’s fair by engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower has since become the capital’s crown jewel. Besides being one of the world’s top tourist attractions, pulling in seven million visitors a year, it is also a working telecoms tower, used for radio and TV transmissions. Winners at the Paris Games will all go home with a small part of the iron colossus.
Each medal will contain an 18 gram crumb of original iron, removed during various renovations, melted down and reforged. Fencing and taekwondo battles will take place in the opulent setting of the Grand Palais art gallery, a glass-and-steel masterpiece created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Its distinctive feature is its beautiful glass domed roof, the largest of its kind in Europe, which covers a cavernous exhibition space of 13,500 square metres (150,000 sq ft).
During World War I, the Grand Palais put its art .
