Olly Watts of ES Global on the Paris Olympics: ‘Even if I say so myself, it’s magnificently iconic’

The 2024 Paris Olympics is building on the legacy of recent Games and increasing the use of existing and temporary structures and sites. The idea has been to take this process a big step further, and this time 95% of the venues will be existing or temporary, with only 5% – essentially the aquatics centre, which will become a swimming pool for the residents of Saint-Denis, and the climbing wall, of which more later – being highly sustainable new-builds.

London arguably pioneered this approach in 2012, with a number of the city’s landmarks used as backdrops for demountable venues. One striking example was Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, which was transformed into a beach volleyball venue in just 36 days.

Such an approach to staging the Games may sound simple, but it requires careful design and planning – and specialist contractors to deliver. Olly Watts is joint CEO of ES Global, one of the world’s leading firms specialising in the delivery of temporary staging and venues for rock concerts and major sporting events.

Watts first got involved in this globetrotting world of work as “a fantastic holiday job”, while he was studying for a photography and film degree in 1980s London. “It was great,” he says. “I was working outside, touring around Europe, and it was really well paid.”

It was not long before the holiday job became a career. “It was hard work, 12- to 14-hour days, seven days a week,” he explains. “But I kept on getting offered more and more jobs.

“Like, ‘Oh, do you fancy going to Brazil for a month?’ or ‘Do you fancy going to Japan?’ It was really hard to not fall into it.”

 

 

ES Global had started out as Edwin Shirley Staging, which built stages for a number of large concerts including Live Aid in 1985. But, when a splinter company was established, backed by financing from the band U2, more than half the staff left to join the new upstart. Watts stayed on and, with many old hands no longer there, he found himself rapidly promoted.

“Having done two summers, I was invited to be in charge of a Rolling Stones tour,” Watts explains. “It was quite an enormous jump up, but I enjoyed it, and so I never looked back.”

Around 13 years ago he had the opportunity to be part of a management buyout with partner and joint CEO Jeff Burke.

From MTV to the Olympics

“Sydney 2000 was the first Games we did,” says Watts. “We did the staging for the opening ceremony. And that was a natural extension of what we were doing in our music business.

“Apart from Beijing in 2008, I think we’ve done stuff on pretty much every Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games and Asian Games since.

“The biggest amount of work we’ve done in one go on the Olympics was in Tokyo, where we ended up doing around £120m-worth of work. And it has expanded, from staging the opening ceremony elements to venues and other aspects of the Olympics.”

ES Global will be working across 57 venues and structures for the Paris Olympics. Many of these are back-of-house facilities and temporary elements within the athletes’ village.

Watts dates the company’s involvement in venue delivery back to the 1994 MTV music awards, when it was tasked with providing a 3,000-capacity theatre in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.  

“It was a live show with a clear wall that you could see the Brandenburg Gate through,” he says. “From that, we kind of stumbled into the venue business.

“We have all sorts of clients and different types of events, but a big part of that is the Olympics, where we do things like whole delivery of shooting venues, golf venues and water polo. The Olympic Games is now very much a central part of our business.

“We’re working on Paris, and we’re already starting to bid on the Milan Winter Olympic Games [in 2026],” he explains. “We’ve also got our eye on LA 28 [Los Angeles will be the host city for the XXXIV Olympiad].

“In fact, we’ve got quite strategic now and we’ve actually set up a company in Australia specifically for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. That sounds a long way off, but the gestation period is significant leading up to that.”

A premier league of architects and engineers

“We have an in-house design department,” he explains. “But we pride ourselves on working with a lot of the best engineers and architects around. We’ve worked with everyone from Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid to Richard Rogers and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands.

“And we work with the premier league of engineers around the world – people like Buro Happold, Arup, Mott MacDonald and Momentum. But we always tend to work with them on the basis of our standard equipment, which we designed,” Watts says. “We’ve got a truss system and various other types of construction systems that we designed.”

Over the years the company has developed its own well-honed approach to design and delivery, based around a robust kit of parts – much of it demountable and standardised components. “What we would do when we’re collaborating with these designers is we’d start very much from a position that this is how we want it to work.

“So, we don’t go and say, ‘There’s a blank piece of paper.’ We’re very much pushing it down a route, and we’ve developed these relationships with people over the years where we understand each other and work in a very collaborative way.

“But we really enjoy the fact that we work with different sorts of engineers and designers, who all have different opinions – we find it very productive. We’re working with some of the best engineering and architectural brains in the world.”

One of ES Global’s key collaborators in Paris this year is Momentum, the Bath and London-based engineers. “In specifically demountable or relocatable architecture, they’ve become real leaders in the field,” Watts says.

Paris climbing wall

Another key collaborator in Paris is London-based WOO Architects, the practice founded in 2014 by Kevin Owens and other members of the team who led the design of the 2012 Olympics on behalf of the London organising committee. “Kevin really is a pre-eminent specialist in the world of sports architecture,” says Watts.

“We have a great relationship with them and we’re working with them on Paris and on the British pavilion for Osaka [Expo 2025].”

WOO is involved in a number of the Paris 2024 venues, but is working with ES Global primarily on the climbing wall at Le Bourget. 

Along with the aquatics centre in Saint-Denis, the Le Bourget climbing venue is the only sports facility to be built specifically for Paris 2024. Five climbing walls will be used during the Games: an indoor wall for warming up and four outdoor walls. The outdoor walls will then be disassembled and used elsewhere while the indoor facilities will become a legacy venue for the Seine-Saint-Denis area, which has a severe shortage of sports facilities (ranked 103rd out of 105 departments in France for such facilities). 

“That’s the most exciting project that we’re doing in Paris,” says Watts. “It’s assembled already and, even if I say so myself, it’s magnificently iconic. 

“It will definitely get the attention. It will be in our brochure for the next 10 years and we’re very, very proud of it.

“The actual structure is 100% based on existing pieces of equipment. We refer to it regularly as being the giant Meccano set, where you have a series of standard components.

“There’s no foundations at all – the entirety of the structure is built on the ground, so there’s no waste even in the groundworks or the foundations. Even the weights that hold it down are actual steel plates. When the event is over, they will be returned and have an entirely different use afterwards.”

Rapid delivery

Although ES Global typically gets involved in discussions with the Olympic cities around four years before the event begins, actual construction of its temporary venues takes just a matter of weeks. “In Paris we started the climbing wall structure in early April and it was more or less finished probably two weeks ago,” says Watts. So it’s about a six-week construction period.

“But, in terms of planning and design, we were probably contracted six months before that and so we’ve been working on design and planning prior to that. Our engagement would usually start for something like the Olympics about four years out from the actual event in terms of the first dialogue on preliminary designs.”

Sustainability

Watts has a first-hand appreciation of the transformation that the 2012 Games brought to London. “The Olympics was a vehicle to regenerate a part of east London,” he says. 

“It was a complete tip before the Olympics – and we can say that without qualification, because our old yard and office was actually on the site of what became the main stadium. So we were right in the middle of it.”

Although London was not the first major sporting event to make use of temporary structures, Watts believes that the UK capital was a pioneer in “really embracing the whole sustainability approach”.

He continues: “No permanent venues were built unless they were going to be required in the future. There were a whole load of venues – including basketball, water polo, shooting – which were conceived from the outset as temporary or relocatable buildings.

“But we were actually feeling that it was just catching up with what we had been doing for a long time,” says Watts. “And so we’re hitting a sweet spot in terms of the opportunity because lots of people have cottoned onto the same thing.

One particular Olympics stands out as the event that led to this change: “If you go back to Athens in 2004, it’s the classic example of how not to do it. They built I don’t know how many venues that were white elephants and that now just sit there with tumbleweed blowing around. The whole thing was just completely and utterly a waste of money and an ecological disaster.”

Watts sees the approach that ES Global has long pioneered as a gamechanger for countries and cities that may in the past have felt they could not host big sporting events like the Olympics because they had become so expensive. Now there is scope to get better value for money. “Our equipment is reusable in multiple different sorts of configurations. And so that underpins how we’re achieving low carbon and just inherent reusability. That is basically what the projects that we deliver are based on.”

“Everyone assumes that you’ve got to spend £10bn on new venues,” he says. “When you get rid of that mindset, it changes the possibility and the opportunity for different places that couldn’t necessarily afford to put on the Games before.”

In an era when starchitects are finally taking a back seat to the need for reuse and sustainability, new approaches to venue design are really coming to the fore. Paris may not be doing anything entirely new but, with its adoption of ambitious targets for temporary and reusable venues, it is taking the process to another level and seeking to set standards for all the Olympic Games of the future.