There will be 10,000 torchbearers to carry the Olympic flame which will cross around sixty French departments from May to July 2024, the organizers of the Paris Olympics explained on Tuesday during a press conference. Swimming champions Laure and Florent Manaudou have been appointed to be “the captains” of this French Olympics torch relay, as well as Dimitri Pavadé (long jump) and Mona Francis (paratriathlon), we learned on Tuesday .
Kicking off the Olympic Games, the flame, lit in Olympia in Greece as tradition dictates, will arrive by sea in Marseille aboard the three-master Bélem on May 8, 2024. It will then begin a journey through France to to July 26, 2024, opening night of the Paris Olympics. The president of the organizing committee, Tony Estanguet, made it clear that the place of final lighting was “not stopped” and “that the Eiffel Tower is not stopped as the place of lighting of the basin”.
New for this French edition, the collective relay: a group of 24 people, including a single bearer, can participate, to represent, for example, a sports federation. They will be 3,000 collectively and 7,000 individually, including people with disabilities, and gender parity, from the age of 15. Each torchbearer will carry the flame for about 4 minutes over a distance of 200 meters.
A third of the flame bearers will be selected by the organizing committee and the sports movement, another third by the torch relay sponsors BPCE (bank and insurance) and Coca-Cola, another third by the other partners of the Olympic Games. and the last 10% by the territories hosting the flame. They may be sports educators, great champions, personalities from a territory, craftsmen with “special know-how” or people “who are committed”.
BPCE will launch its selection on June 1 and Coca in July. The vast majority will be known at the start of 2024, but the names of the great champions and personalities will be spelled out over the months, with the ultra-guarded secret of the last torchbearer. According to the rules of the IOC (International Olympic Committee), elected personalities in office, or religious personalities, cannot carry the flame.
The relay route in detail will be unveiled on June 23. It will cross 64 French territories, 54 metropolitan departments, 5 overseas territories and 5 territories, such as Montpellier, towns which wished to participate while the departments did not want to. Some departments had deemed the cost of 180,000 euros prohibitive.
Asked about the security around the relay, the Cojo explained that there would be “a traveling bubble” around the flame provided by the State (gendarmerie, police), to which local security forces will be added in each territory. additional. For the last Summer Olympics in 2021, the Olympic torch relay had been banned from public roads in many departments, including Tokyo, due to the Covid. At the London Olympics in 2013, 8,000 people took turns. The Paralympic Games torch relay, which will arrive on August 28 in Paris, for the opening of the Paralympic Games, will include 1,000 torchbearers, and will be shorter.
