An unforgettable symbol of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the cauldron will make its big comeback next summer. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron announced it on Friday on the social network X, and he will make it an annual event: "It will come back every summer. From the music festival to the sports festival, until the Los Angeles 2028 Games". The tenant of the Élysée Palace accompanied this message with a video of the cauldron, with Celine Dion's voice to be heard singing L'Hymne à l'Amour, as during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Games. According to France Info, the cauldron will return precisely to the Tuileries Garden, as in 2024, from June 23 to September 14. "The cost of restoring the system to working order is estimated at 2,5 million », according to our colleagues. The bill could be partly covered by the surpluses of the COJOP budget – 26,8 million euros according to the balance sheet presented in December.
"We have been studying several scenarios for several months, several possible locations, several configurations, confided the designer, Mathieu Lehanneur, on BFMTV, pleasantly surprised that it could find the Tuileries Garden again. Honestly, I didn't imagine it because it's a sublime, grandiose place, but full of constraints. There were other candidate locations, but to be honest, if it could come back, I dreamed that it would come back here because that's where it was discovered and that's also where it was designed." The Olympic cauldron attracted more than 200.000 curious visitors last year.
