A taste of the drama and beauty of this summer’s Paris Olympics has unfolded in the foothills of Greece with the lighting of the flame that will illuminate the world’s biggest sports event.
In a ceremony held amid the ruins of ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Games 2,800 years ago, the flame was kindled by performers dressed as priestesses, though this year because of weather conditions the torch was not ignited as usual in a parabolic mirror – which focuses the sun’s rays – but from a flame lit during a rehearsal.
Emerging from the ruins, where she had invoked Apollo, the Greek sun god, for light and peace “for all peoples of the world”, the actor playing the role of high priestess then handed the flame to the first of hundreds of torchbearers who will carry it on an 11-day journey around Greece.
This year, that honour fell to the country’s Olympic gold medallist and rowing champion Stefanos Douskos, who glanced up at the silver torch to ensure it was blazing before taking the first steps of the more than 3,100-mile relay. The flame will be handed over to the organisers of the 33rd Olympiad in Athens on 26 April before making its way on the Belem – a French three-masted sailing ship built in 1896, the year of the first modern Games – to Marseille and then Paris for the opening of the Games on 26 July.
With war raging in Europe and the Middle East, the ceremony was also infused with something else: a desire for the spirit of truce that the ancients held dear during the original Olympic Games.
Giving voice to that desire, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, told France 2 TV from ancient Olympia: “This torch is a message of peace, a message of friendship between peoples, which is all the stronger at a time when the world is in such bad shape.”
As such, she said, the Olympic flame would pass by the site of the 2015 Islamist attack on the Bataclan concert hall and the Shoah [Holocaust] Memorial when it made its way through the French capital in July. Paris city hall, which is hosting the flame on 14 July, when France celebrates Bastille Day, would stay open all night so that “visitors and Parisians can see this symbol of fraternal transmission across the planet”, she added.
Addressing the Olympic ceremony, French organisers highlighted the equality of this summer’s Games: with full gender parity there will, for the first time, be as many female as male athletes contesting. Paris 2024 will also include competitive breakdancing, an urban sport that originated in the hip-hop culture of 1970s block parties in the US.
