Paris Olympics flame lit at Greek cradle of ancient games
Euronews
Even without the help of Apollo, the ame that is to burn at the Paris Olympics was kindled on Tuesday at the site of the ancient games in southern Greece.
Cloudy skies prevented the traditional lighting, when an actress dressed as an ancient Greek priestess uses the sun to ignite a silver torch after o ering up a symbolic prayer to Apollo, the ancient Greek sun god.
Instead, a backup ame was used that had been lit on the same spot Monday, during the - nal rehearsal.
Normally, the foremost of a group of priestesses in long, pleated dresses dips the fuel lled torch into a parabolic mirror which focuses the sun's rays on it, and re spurts forth.
But this time she didn't even try, going straight for the backup, kept in a copy of an ancient Greek pot.
Ironically, a few minutes later the sun shone.
From the ancient stadium in Olympia, a relay of torchbearers will carry the ame more than 5,000 kilometres through Greece until the handover to Paris Games organisers in Athens on April 26.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said the ame lighting combined "a pilgrimage to our past in ancient Olympia, and an act of faith in our future."
"In these di cult times ... with wars and con icts on the rise, people are fed up with all the hate, the aggression and negative news," he said.
"We are longing for something which brings us together; something that is unifying; something that gives us hope."
Ancient history
Thousands of spectators from all over the world packed Olympia for Tuesday's event amid the ruined temples and sports grounds where the ancient games were held from 776 BC to 393 AD.
The sprawling site, in a lush valley by the con uence of two rivers, is at its prettiest in the spring, teeming with pink- owering Judas trees, small blue irises and the occasional red anemone.
The rst torchbearer was Greek rower Stefanos Douskos, a gold medallist in 2021 in Tokyo. He ran to a nearby monument that contains the heart of French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the driving force behind the modern revival of the games.
The next runner was Laure Manaudou, a French swimmer who won three medals at Athens in 2004. She handed over to senior European Union o cial Margaritis Schinas, a Greek.
The ame will travel from Athens' port of Piraeus on the Belem, a French three-masted sailing ship built in 1896 - the year of the rst modern games in Athens.
According to Captain Aymeric Gibet, it's due on May 8 in the southern French port of Marseille, a city founded by Greek colonists some 2,600 years ago.
The Belem arrived in Katakolo, near Olympia, on Monday. Lookers-on included a small, enthusiastic group of tourists from the northwestern French region of Brittany, where the ship's homeport of Nantes is, waving French and Breton ags.
"We thought it would be a unique opportunity to see the ame lighting at the historic site of Olympia," said Jean-Michel Pasquet from Lorient, near Nantes. "And when we also learnt the Belem would carry the ame ... we said we must do this."
But Pasquet said he'd have to watch the Paris Games from home.
"For us, it would be really very expensive, una ordable," to go to the venues, he said. "So we'll watch them on television ... from our armchairs."