Countdown for Paris Olympics hits 100-day mark; torch relay launched
The Olympic Torch is lit and the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics is 100 days away.
The countdown clock in Paris hit the 100-day mark Tuesday. That came on the same day the torch was lit at the birthplace of the sporting competition in Ancient Olympia, Greece.
A relay of torchbearers will carry the flame along a 5,000-kilometer route through Greece until handing it over to the Paris Games organizers in Athens on April 26.
The French capital will officially open the games July 26 with a celebration on the Seine River.
Flame lit at Olympic birthplace
The torch relay for the Paris 2024 Olympics set off Tuesday from Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient Games, after the flame was lit in a ritual inspired by antiquity and marked by messages of hope amid multiple global crises.
“The Olympic flame that we are lighting today symbolizes this hope for a better future,” said International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach.
Owing to cloudy weather, Greek actresses in the role of ancient priestesses used a flame lit in a rehearsal Monday in the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera, near the stadium where the Olympics were born in 776 BC.
Carrying the flame in a pot, Greek actress Mary Mina lit the torch for the first bearer, 2020 Olympic rowing champion Stefanos Ntouskos.
Retired swimmer Laure Manaudou,
who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, followed as France’s first torchbearer in Olympia.
The torch harks back to the ancient Olympics when a sacred flame burned throughout the Games. The tradition was revived in 1936 for the Berlin Olympics.
During the 11-day relay on Greek soil, some 600 torchbearers will carry the flame through 41 municipalities.
‘Inclusive’ Games
Officials on Tuesday stressed that the Paris Games will set new milestones, following the legacy of the other two prior Olympics held in the French capital.
“The Olympic Flame will shine over the first Olympic Games inspired by our Olympic Agenda reforms from start to finish,” Bach
said. “These Olympic Games will be younger, more inclusive, more urban, more sustainable. These will be the very first Olympic Games with full gender parity, because the IOC allocated exactly 50 percent of the places to female and male athletes,” he said.
For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic imposed toneddown events for the 2020 Tokyo
Olympics and 2022 Beijing Winter Games, the ceremony was back with full regalia and scores of spectators.
The Olympic flame will be handed over to Paris 2024 organizers in a ceremony at the all-marble Panathenaic Stadium, site of the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, on April 26.
On April 27, the flame will begin its journey to France on board the 19th-century three-masted barque Belem, which was launched just weeks after the 1896 Athens Games.
Ten thousand torchbearers will then carry the flame across 64 French territories.
It will travel through 400 towns and dozens of tourist attractions during its 12,000-kilometre journey through mainland France and overseas French territories in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific.
On July 26 it will form the centerpiece of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
The ceremony is planned to be held on the river Seine, with thousands of athletes sailing along a six-kilometer stretch of the river on barges — the first time it has not been held in the Games’ main stadium.