Venue: Piscine patinoire de Boulogne-Billancourt
Town: Boulogne-Billancourt, FR

Piscine patinoire de Boulogne-Billancourt (lit. 'Boulogne-Billancourt Pool and Ice Rink') is an administrative ensemble consisting of two neighboring but physically separate sports venues located in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France, just west of Paris. The ice rink was decommissioned and converted to a padel center in 2025. In its original incarnation, it was home to the ice hockey section of multisports organization Athletic Club Boulogne-Billancourt, one of the sport's most prominent West European representatives in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ice sports have a long history in the Boulogne-Billancourt area, as the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne were a favorite destination of skaters during the 19th and early 20th century. The lakes were also a prime source of commercial ice for the food and restaurant industries, much of it extracted by the sector's leading company, the Société des glacières de Paris (lit. 'Paris Ice Houses Company'). As the industry moved from natural to artificial ice at the turn of the twentieth century, the company opened its main ice factory in nearby Billancourt (which later fused with Boulogne-sur-Seine to form Boulogne-Billancourt). According to figure skating coach Jacqueline Vaudecrane, she was instrumental in securing the new building in a meeting with France's then ministry of sport, using leverage gained from the victory of her student Jacqueline du Bief's in the 1952 World Figure Skating Championships. However, the municipal archives of Boulogne-Billancourt state that preliminary work had in fact started several years before, at the behest of Jacques Lacarrière, general secretary in charge of ice hockey at the French Ice Sports Federation (which administered the sport before it became independent) and federation president Georges Guérard, as downtown Paris' Palais des sports de Grenelle was showing serious signs of aging. The rink's actual backer was grocery store heir Philippe Potin, who help procure much of the budge