It's done. 101 days before the opening, the OCOG Paris 2024 checked a new box on its schedule on Tuesday April 16, with the lighting of the Olympic flame in Olympia. It is not decisive, just symbolic, but still sheds a little more light on the event and the last phase of its preparation.
From this ceremony, history will undoubtedly remember the images already seen many times of an actress dressed as an ancient Greek priestess, Mary Mina, igniting a silver torch with careful gestures. It will also remember that the first torchbearer, Greek rower Stefanos Ntouskos, gold medalist at the Tokyo 2020 Games, passed the torch to former swimmer Laure Manaudou, who returned to Greece twenty years after her three olympic medals at the Athens 2004 Games (photo below).
The anecdote will remind us that the weather conditions, a very cloudy sky, prevented the flame from being ignited by the traditional method, using the sun's rays. The organizers resorted to plan B, an emergency flame lit in the same place the day before, during the last rehearsal. Premonitory? In the Parisian ranks, many prayed to the heavens that a withdrawal scenario would not also be necessary on Friday July 26, the day of the opening ceremony.
The rest is already written. For the Olympic flame, it promises to be a long string of stages in often unknown terrain. After eleven days in Greece, where Athens and the Panathenaic stadium, scene of the first Games of the modern era in 1896, will be visited, the torch will cross the Mediterranean aboard the three-masted Belem, for an arrival scheduled for May 8 in the Old Port of Marseille.
In France, the relay will pass through more than 400 towns and villages in 64 territories. The procession of 10.000 individual torchbearers, plus 3.000 torchbearers gathered in teams of 24, will end in the streets of Paris on Friday July 26. In the meantime, the “ ocean relay » will have set sail, from June 8 to 17, to visit the overseas territories, Guyana, Reunion, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe and Martinique.
