The Olympic flame will join the Seine for the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on July 26, 2024, descending the Saint-Martin canal from Seine-Saint-Denis, the organizers revealed on Monday, detailing the Parisian program , which will begin on July 14 and 15.
“On the day of the ceremony, the relay will leave Seine-Saint-Denis to enter Paris,” said Emmanuel Grégoire, the first deputy of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, during a presentation of the Parisian route of the Olympic flame at the museum. Carnival.
On July 25, the flame must stop in La Courneuve, a town near the Stade de France and the Saint-Denis canal, a waterway shared between the capital and its northern suburbs. The map shown indicates that on the 26th, the flame will take the Canal-Saint-Denis, the Bassin de La Villette and the Canal Saint-Martin, to the Place de la République.
Neither the president of the Organizing Committee (Cojo), Tony Estanguet, nor Anne Hidalgo wanted to give details on this last journey before an unprecedented ceremony on the Seine. But a source from the town hall confirmed to AFP that this journey on the canal would be made by boat.
Before that, the flame, lit on April 16 in Olympia, arrived on May 8 in Marseille and which will pass through more than 400 French cities for more than two months, will spend two whole days in the host city, on July 14 and 15, to “share with the whole world what makes the richness of Paris”, underlined Anne Hidalgo.
Champs-Elysées, Assembly, Senate, Pantheon, Bastille, Louvre: the 14th, a national holiday, will be dedicated to the “heart of the capital” and its emblematic monuments, announced the elected socialist. The flame will spend the night at the Hôtel de Ville. The arrangements related to the usual July 14 festivities (military parade, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower, firefighters’ balls) will be known later, she said.
On July 15, it is more the Paris of the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods that the flame will visit: Porte de La Chapelle and Goutte d’Or, Butte-aux-Cailles, Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont… It must then travel Picardy and the rest of Ile-de-France before returning on the 26th. Thirty people will surround the bearers of the flame, who will be around a hundred per day (10,000 throughout the national route), recalled the deputy at Pierre Rabadan Sports. “The flame is a symbol of peace, friendship, humanism. We need these moments, even more at the moment,” said Tony Estanguet, in a very tense social context in France with a week of riots following the death of Nahel.
