Less than three and a half months before the opening of the Paris 2024 Games, the Olympic flame will be lit on Tuesday in Ancient Olympia, Greece, to begin a journey that will take it from the Acropolis to French Polynesia before arriving in the French capital on 26 July.
The event will be open to the public for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 Winter Games to be held without spectators.
Around 600 dignitaries are expected to attend the lighting of the Olympic flame, scheduled for 08:30 GMT on Tuesday. The delegation will be led by Greek Olympic Committee president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and her IOC counterpart, Thomas Bach.
The lighting ritual will include actresses dressed as ancient priestesses who will bring the Olympic flame to life with the help of a parabolic mirror – a procedure known in ancient Greece – in Olympia, where the Games were born in 776 BC.
The last Ancient Olympic Games were held in 393 AD, almost twelve centuries after their inception, when, following the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the Edict of Thessalonica (27 February 380 AD), Emperor Theodosius banned all pagan festivals, including the Olympic Games, which had a related religious origin.
American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato will sing the Olympic anthem at a ceremony set amid the ruins of the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera, and the lighting of the flame marks the countdown to every modern Olympic Games.
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The torch relay ritual originated in the ancient Olympic Games, where the fire burned throughout the event. The tradition returned to the Modern Games, but not until the XI Modern Games, held in Berlin in 1936.
The first torchbearer will be 2020 Greek Olympic rowing champion Stefanos Douskos. Former French swimming star Laure Manaudou, Olympic champion at Athens 2004, is expected to be the first torchbearer for the Paris 2024 delegation.
During the eleven days that the flame will cross Greek territory, around 600 torchbearers will carry the Olympic flame to 41 locations, covering a total of 5,000 kilometres.
“We prepared this programme for the Tokyo Games, but the pandemic did not allow us to carry it out,” Hellenic Olympic Committee torchbearer Thanassis Vassiliadis told the Kathimerini newspaper last week.
The official also announced a “maximum level” of security during the ceremony, with police officers “discreet but present everywhere” to carry out reconnaissance. “No one will be able to enter the stands without accreditation,” he specified.
After arriving at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, where the first modern games were held in 1896, the flame will be handed over to the Paris 2024 organisers on 26 April in a ceremony attended by the legendary 89-year-old Nana Mouskouri. The following day, the Flame will embark on the sailing vessel Belem for Marseille (south-east France), where it is expected to arrive on 8 May.
From there, it will begin a long journey through more than 400 towns and 12,000 km of French territory, both in mainland Europe and overseas, passing through the hands of thousands of torchbearers before arriving in Paris for the opening ceremony of the Games on the Seine on 26 July.
