GL events wins event production of the year at the event production awards!

This accolade celebrates the company’s incredible work in delivering temporary infrastructure for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

As an Official Partner and Overlay Provider for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, GL events played a crucial role in delivering 70% of all overlay for the Games and over 160,000 grandstand seats across more than 60 venues—an enormous logistical and engineering challenge. The team collaborated closely with all parties to ensure every structure met local regulations and safety standards.

GL events was responsible for:  

• Overlay solutions at 8 Central Paris venues, 6 football stadiums, 18 training venues, 2 Olympic villages and 15 arenas within Central Paris.  
• Design, maintenance and operation of all electrical installations, ensuring a clean and reliable power supply to more than 55 sites, including the Broadcast Centre. This meant installing 8,000 distribution boards and laying more than 1,200km of cables, in total covering 31 competition venues, 10 training venues and 14 non-competition venues.  
• Design and delivery of two event venues in their entirety – Versailles, which involved the supply and installation of 16,500 grandstand seats and the South Paris Arena where the team designed and built 80,000sqm of competition halls and 25 training fields for 7 different sports.  
• 25 “satellite” projects, including the 100,000 square meters of structures needed to accommodate 15,000 military personnel. 

Aside from the obvious challenges of scale, volume of equipment, number of sites, and number of people required to facilitate the project, there were some major logistical and technical challenges:

• Understanding the topography of the city – the load bearing capability of each historic site (because of the network of metro tunnels beneath the surface), was until then, untested.  This involved complex scanning and investigation and consequently designing grandstand structures which were structurally robust enough to take the weight of infrastructure and spectators en masse.
• Logistical planning of delivery, installation and derig, working around the beating heart of the city which was not able to stop or be significantly delayed.  Managing this drip feed of deliveries to eight separate city centre sites was incredibly complex. At the end of the Games, the pressure for Parisians to take back their city was considerable, so speed was key – while prioritising safety on and around all sites.
• Protecting sites of priceless historic importance – working on top of and amongst the historic monuments of central Paris and the iconic site of Versailles, with heavy machinery and vast structures required millimetre precision and incredible attention to detail.  Monuments on city centre venues were individually boxed, protecting them as work went on around them.  While at Versailles, a process of photographic reporting took place before the project could even start – cataloguing everything down to each tree. This was the blueprint to which the site had to be returned.
• The power project required a unique approach, managed from a dedicated 20,000sqm warehouse.  Temporary transformers were manufactured to allow the city’s high voltage to be transformed to low voltage and delivered to the 50 venues via a vast quantity of distribution boards and cabling.
• Adapting venues for different sports and between Olympic and Paralympic venues was another feat of complex logistical planning and seamless movement of commodities. During the Games, transitions between sports took place at eight venues, followed by transition at a further five venues before the start of Paralympics. Between 8th September and the end of October, all temporary installations were dismantled. 

The sustainable commitment made by Paris 2024 was to utilise 95% existing or reusable temporary infrastructure. Honouring this commitment was fundamental to GL events being awarded four contracts by the organising committee. 

100% of materials used for temporary structures and infrastructure on Paris 2024 had a second life (either reuse, repurpose, or recycle) from tents, seating stands and scaffolding to sports presentation lighting and rigging. Over 350 items were listed for post-Games recycling! 

We placed a huge emphasis on implementing a sustainable procurement process in order to preclude deforestation and an unnecessary carbon footprint. We made sure to clearly forecast the quantities of waste allowing us to pre-plan reuse projects with our local partners. 

In 2023 France generated 92% of its electricity from “clean” sources – with only 8% reliance on fossil fuels. For this reason, GL events used the existing power network in Paris rather than temporary generators. By converting this high voltage power to low voltage power distributed to venues, we eliminated redundancy and ensured reliable power supply. 

This achievement is a testament to the company’s hard work and innovation when delivering event solutions, reinforcing its position as a leader in the industry. GL events continues to set new standards, proving that large-scale, temporary infrastructure can be both functional and provide a spectacular spectator experience.