101 days before the Olympic opening ceremony, the Olympic flame will be lit this Tuesday at the ancient Greek site, before a vast journey which will take it from the Acropolis to Paris.
The flamboyant return of a magnificent tradition. After two editions marred by restrictions linked to the Covid-19 pandemic for the Tokyo Summer Olympics – which ultimately took place in 2021 and not 2020 – and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, the lighting ceremony of the flame in Olympia, the true cradle of Olympism, will regain all its colors this Tuesday with an audience of officials expected. Some 600 hand-picked guests will attend this moment in history, including the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach, the French Minister of Sports Amélie Oudéa-Castera and the President of Paris 2024, Tony Estanguet.
But not only that, many Greeks and other tourists also made the trip to attend the rehearsals of this ceremony. Such as Stefanos, a young thirty-year-old who came with his family from the neighboring town of Sparta to “show your children what the spirit and magic of the Games are”who were not yet born when Athens welcomed them in 2004. “I think it’s important to show young people that even though it may seem a little old-fashioned, this ceremony marks a true Greek cultural heritage.” Thus, in the sanctuary of Olympia, in front of the 2,600 year old ruins of the temple of Hera, the “high priestess”, dressed in a costume inspired by Antiquity, will light the flame at lunchtime. As has now been the case for 88 years and the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin.
This ritual in such a place is done “with great humility”explained to AFP Nikos Aliagas, the Franco-Greek television and radio host who will be the host, exactly 101 days before the opening ceremony of the Paris Games, organized from July 26 to 11 august. “Symbols are important in Greece. We are (…) in the universal because we carry something that does not belong to us, which is a heritage”he added, affirming that he wanted to be “an intermediary” between Greece and France. The entire sanctuary of Olympia, ravaged throughout history by earthquakes and floods, was dedicated to Zeus and the Games aimed to pay homage to him. On the site, a statue of “god of gods”now extinct, was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Greek actress Mary Mina will play the role of the “high priestess” this Tuesday Alkis Konstantinidis / REUTERS
Like every two years, the ceremony takes place near the stadium where the young athletes of Antiquity played their first Games in the 8th century BC. At the time, women were prohibited from participating, and remained so until the abolition of the Ancient Games in 393 AD. AD In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron launched the countdown to the Olympics on Monday by reassuring about security around the opening ceremony on the Seine, while setting out fallback solutions, “limited to Trocadéro” or in the Stade de France, in the event of a terrorist threat. In Olympia, the system for lighting the flame involves the use of the sun and a parabolic cylindrical mirror, a process already known to the ancient Greeks: the rays of the sun which are reflected in the container release intense heat allowing to get a flame.
Laure Manaudou, first French torchbearer
While Monday was particularly sunny and warm with temperatures slightly above 30°, weather forecasts predict cloudy skies this Tuesday in this western region of the Peloponnese peninsula (southwest), but even in the event of capricious sky or, worse, rain, everything is planned so that the fire can arise. There “high priestess”, Greek actress Mary Mina, will then be able to brandish the torch which will then be brought by the first torchbearer, Stefanos Ntouskos, Olympic rowing champion at the Tokyo Olympics. French swimmer Laure Manaudou, who won her first Olympic title in the 400m freestyle at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, will succeed her and will thus be the first French relay runner, the Greek Olympic committee announced on Monday. She will thus launch a long relay which will see the flame pass through numerous hands, mostly anonymous, sometimes famous as will be the case with the former scorer of the France team Jean-Pierre Papin, the actor Jamel Debbouze or even the astronaut Thomas Pesquet, to name but a few. A huge honor for Laure Manaudou, while her brother Florent hopes to be the male standard bearer of the French delegation during the opening ceremony.
The flame will then begin a journey of 5,000 km across Greece for 11 days, from the island of Corfu, in the Ionian Sea, to that of Santorini in the Cyclades, with its famous postcard setting, via Kastellorizo, in southeast of the country. She will also climb the Acropolis rock to spend a night near the Parthenon. Then the flame will be transmitted to the French organizers on April 26 in the Panathenaic stadium in Athens, the venue in which the first Olympic Games of the modern era were played in 1896. In Piraeus, the large port south of Athens, the Flamme will then board the three-masted Belem to disembark on May 8 in Marseille, in the south-east of France. The symbol of the Olympic Games will then cross all of France, passing through the Antilles and French Polynesia, to arrive in Paris on the day of the opening ceremony, July 26. The flame that burned throughout the Games in Antiquity represented the ideal of peace and unity between peoples.
