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Michel Zilbermann, the founder of the SaintDenis athletics meeting, died after a long illness on Tuesday 28 April.
Created at the Auguste Delaune stadium, in June 1994 the Saint-Denis meeting played host to some of the biggest names of our sport including living legends Carl Lewis, Sergey Bubka and Javier Sotomayor.
The annual meeting in the Stade de France as it stands today, the Meeting Areva, was born in 1999 from the fusion of two Parisian meetings. On the one hand the Saint-Denis Meeting in the Auguste Delaune stadium, and the other the Paris Meeting which took place in Charléty stadium.
Though the two meetings didn’t officially become one entity until 31 March 2000, the first action was played out in front of a crowd of 57,724 on Saturday 3 July 1999 in the Stade de France, the inauguration of the stadium’s athletics track and the meeting has never looked back reaching its present record attendance of 70,253 spectators on 1 July 2005.
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