Flame for Paris Olympics is lit amid the ruins where ancient games were held

The flame that is to burn at the Paris Olympics was kindled yesterday 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 offering up a symbolic prayer to Apollo, the ancient Greek sun god.

Instead, a back-up flame was used that had been lit on the same spot on Monday, during the final rehearsal.

Normally, the foremost of a group of priestesses in long, pleated dresses offers a prayer to the ancient Greek sun god, Apollo. She then dips the fuel-filled torch into a parabolic mirror which focuses the sun’s rays on it, and fire spurts forth.

But this time she did not even try, going straight for the back-up, kept in a copy of an ancient Greek pot.

From the ancient stadium in Olympia, a relay of torchbearers will carry the flame more than 3,100 miles through Greece until the handover to Paris Games organisers in Athens on April 26.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said the flame lighting combined “a pilgrimage to our past in ancient Olympia, and an act of faith in our future”.

“In these difficult times … with wars and conflicts 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.”

Thousands of spectators from all over the world packed Olympia for yesterday’s event amid the ruined temples where the ancient games were held from 776 BC-393 AD.

The first 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.