Inside the Private Location Where Team USA Trains (and Recovers) in Paris
A suburban gym outside the city turned out to be Team USA’s haven during the 2024 Olympic Games. BY KRISTY ALPERT
Something feels inherently spammy about an email from an obscure marketing agency in Cyprus requesting to “pop in” on short notice. Which is why Arnaud Zumaglia, general manager of ATHLETICA (a suburban gym outside of Paris), almost deleted that email back in 2018.
“They claimed to hold the rights of several international Olympic delegations to search for training sites for the Games,” Arnaud recalls. “I was very suspicious.”
Seven days later, the American delegation showed up at his gym, unannounced, and Arnaud got his first glimpse into Team USA’s wish to use his suburban sports center as its home base when they arrived in Paris for the 2024 Olympics.
Fast-forward to today, and ATHLETICA is not only where Team USA’s athletes have trained and recovered during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, but it’s where most of the athletes were on the morning of their competitions, finishing their final warm-ups/rituals before hopping on a shuttle straight to their venues.
Courtesy of Kristy Alpert
The gym is about 10 miles outside of the Paris city limits in Eaubonne, a suburb in the Val d’Oise region. After Team USA signed the contract, the gym went from a community center for young French athletes to a high-performance training facility for Olympians to use during the Games. The complex now includes a 25-meter swimming pool, 400-meter outdoor track, a soccer stadium, four weight training areas, a restaurant, a multi-sport complex (now the biggest in Île-de-France), and an indoor athletics hall. It also has three regeneration spaces with cryotherapy pods and swanky high-tech hydrobeds, which have water-jet massagers, light therapy, and aromatherapy built-in to help athletes get a “multisensory rest” (i.e., it’s a mental health thing, and we want one!)
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Speaking of Mental Health…
Courtesy of Kristy Alpert
There are even 100 hotel-room style rooms for staff, U.S. volunteers, and the athletes themselves, as an alternative option to the Olympic Village (which got some less-than-favorable athlete reviews). While there were no condom dispensers like in the Olympic Village, ATHLETICA’s rooms are private (with private bathrooms) and come with individual coffee/tea makers, robes/slippers, and, crucially, air conditioning. Also, the beds are non-cardboard and have French-made mattresses custom-designed for an athlete’s body. We’re not saying we know what’s best for Team USA…but if it were us, we’d be sleeping at ATHLETICA until we had our medals and then we’d move back to the Olympic Village. You know, for the after stuff.
Courtesy of Kristy Alpert
The United States committee was hyper-thorough in customizing the place to be “American athlete ready,” which obviously meant adding air conditioning and making sure there would be enough peanut butter to go around. “Peanut butter, you know, is not really used in France,” Arnaud laughed. “People here know peanut butter, but they are not consuming so much. For American people, I guess it is a way of bringing in some very important lipids, so they asked for a lot.”
Along with peanut butter sandwiches and smoothies for grab-and-go options, the ATHLETICA team prepared to serve 600-800 daily Team-USA-approved meals—each with super specific micro- and macro-nutrition labels—with three courses and decidedly French presentations.
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Courtesy of Kristy Alpert
“Honestly, the most surprising thing is ultimately the ease with which this collaboration has been carried out for four years,” said Arnaud about working with the Americans. “After so much discussion and sharing, we have almost become colleagues, and sometimes even friends with some of them…but also, I can’t not mention ‘ice cubes.’ We French are familiar with the use of ice cubes in cocktails during the summer, but the American request for 24 tons of ice cubes in two months is unheard of for us.”
To put it in perspective, 24 tons of ice is equal to 48,000 pounds—enough to almost fill a 490,000-gallon Olympic swimming pool. Because ice is not easy to come by in Europe, ATHLETICA rented ice machines and went to three different European ice manufacturers to try to find the three different types of ice Team USA requested (pallet ice, cubed ice, and “nugget” ice with a hole in it).
Courtesy of Kristy Alpert
In the end, there’s a decent chance all the ice in France—and all its peanut butter too—have been be stashed inside this exclusive training center, chilling and lipid-fying America’s finest competitors while they’ve worked to bring home the gold.