For the last bearer of the Olympic flame, invited to light the cauldron on Friday July 26, you will have to wait. Wait and speculate. But less than 200 days before the opening of the Paris 2024 Games, the OCOG has lifted a corner of the veil on the identity of the torchbearers. He revealed the names of the captains of the sixty-nine collective relays.
Guided in all circumstances by a desire to rewrite the scenario of the Games, the organizing committee innovated. He took the concept of collective relays out of his box of ideas. Pleasure shared, emotion shared.
Each of them will be made up of 24 people. For the Olympic flame, there will be sixty-nine of them. For the Paralympic Torch Relay, reduced to just four days (August 25 to 28), the group version will have six teams.
Clarification: the relays are organized by the thirty-four Olympic and Paralympic sports federations represented at the Summer Games, plus the Tahitian surfing federation, each having the right to form two teams.
« These collective relays are teams of 24 people, made up of champions, athletes, people who play sports on a daily basis, volunteers, referees, coaches, all licensed from these federations, explains Delphine Moulin, the director of celebrations at COJO Paris 2024. It was important to us that everyone involved in sport across France could take part in the relay. »
The casting assembled by the sports federations, with the help of the national Olympic committee (CNOSF), presents itself as a rather disparate mixture of known faces and more anonymous names. The elders rub shoulders with the younger ones. Champions who have become coaches live alongside Olympic medalists.
In athletics, the FFA selected Manuela Montebrun, bronze medalist in the hammer throw at the Beijing Games in 2008, invited to lead the collective relay on May 29 in her hometown of Laval, in Mayenne, and Just Kwaou-Mathey, the one of the candidates for a ticket to Paris 2024 over 110 m hurdles.
Table tennis gave itself a nod to history by recomposing the men's doubles bronze medalist at the Sydney 2000 Games. Patrick Chila will lead the pace on May 28 in La Romagne, Maine-et- Loire. Jean-Philippe Gatien, long-time sports director of the COJO Paris 2024, who resigned last year, will play the role of captain of a collective relay on June 27 in the city of Metz.
The French Sailing Federation has chosen a more contemporary option with two potentials selected for the Paris 2024 Games: Charline Picon, double Olympic medalist in windsurfing (gold in Rio 2016, silver in Tokyo 2020), now entered in 49er, and Camille Lecointre, bronze medalist at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 in 470.
Fencing preferred the mix of genres by associating one of its most illustrious blades, Laura Flessel, five-time Olympic medalist in epee and former Minister of Sports (May 2017 to September 2018), and a young athlete, referee and more anonymous supervisor, Paolo Bois-Rolet. The first of the two will carry the flame at the head of a relay to Guadeloupe, where the torch will be welcomed by the club of its childhood, in the town of Petit-Bourg.
Another personality invited to play captain: Jean-Christophe Rolland. President of the International Rowing Federation (World Rowing), and member of the IOC. He will carry the flame on July 21, five days before the opening, to Nogent-sur-Marne and Joinville-le-Pont, in the eastern suburbs of Paris.
For the rest of the cast, we must remember the names of Laurent Tillie, the coach of the French volleyball team, Olympic champion at the Tokyo 2020 Games, now based in Japan; Camille Lacourt, five-time world swimming champion; Emilie Le Pennec, the only French gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal, on the uneven bars in 2004 in Athens; Anne-Caroline Chausson, Olympic champion in BMX at the 2008 Beijing Games; Pascal Gentil, two-time Olympic bronze medalist in taekwondo (Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004).
The OCOG will unveil on Monday January 15 the identity of individual flame bearers – renamed “ the scouts” -, the majority of whom are anonymous.
