The Paris 2024 Olympic Games will begin tomorrow, and the City of Light is preparing to welcome the world’s best athletes in 44 different disciplines.
Paris 2024 will have a unique and different opening, as the organizers decided that the Seine River would be the setting to give a unique vision to this emblematic ceremony, which normally takes place in a stadium and is where athletes of all nationalities parade.
Each delegation will be on a boat and the more than 10,000 athletes will cross the city center from east to west.
The route will be six kilometres long and will end at Trocadero, right in front of the iconic Eiffel Tower, where the closing ceremony and spectacles such as the lighting of the Olympic cauldron will take place.
For all those lucky enough to attend the Olympic Games, there will be no charge for the opening ceremony to watch the athletes’ parades from the upper piers, while the only paid entrances will be to the lower piers of the Austerlitz bridge and up to the Iena bridge.
The parade will set off from the Pont d’Austerlitz, next to the Jardin des Plantes, making its way between the two islands in the city centre, Ile Saint Louis and Ile de la Cité, before crossing under eight of the ten bridges on the Seine.
They will also pass by iconic sites in Paris and some of the official venues of the Olympic Games, such as the Place de la Concorde, the Esplanade des Invalides and the Grand Palais. They will also pass by Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, Pont des Arts, Pont Neuf, Pont Alexandre III and the Musée d’Orsay.
The opening ceremony will be held tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. Mexico City time.
There will be 35 venues hosting some type of discipline. The majority will be in Paris, with 13 venues in the City of Light area. Meanwhile, the area known as Ile-de-France will have 12 venues, and 10 more will be located throughout the country in very specific disciplines.
French symbol
For the Olympic Games, the organizers introduced Phryges, which are small Phrygian caps with the symbol of freedom for the French people, so that is why they chose them to be the symbol for this edition.
The Phryges are based on an item of clothing that is a symbol of freedom. After appearing on some Latin American flags, before being popularized by the French revolutionaries, the Phrygian cap has become a familiar symbol in France.
Emblem of revolutions, of the French Republic and of liberty, the Phrygian cap appears on the French national icon Marianne, on busts in town halls across the country, on stamps and in national school curricula.
The Olympic Village will span parts of three cities: Saint-Denis, Saint Ouen and L’Ile Saint-Denis. It will be home to 14,250 athletes during the Olympic Games and 8,000 during the Paralympic Games. Up to 60,000 meals will be served per day and a medical clinic will be available to athletes at any time.
According to the Paris government, once the Games are over, the area will be transformed into a neighborhood that will provide 2,500 homes, a student residence, a hotel, a three-hectare park, offices and services for the city, as well as more than 3,000 square meters of shops.
Athletes’ beds have been in the spotlight after several athletes have shown that they are made of cardboard.
These types of beds were first introduced at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and have now been reinstated in the Olympic Village for Paris, prompting a reaction from athletes.
Sofia Reinoso, who was the first Mexican to arrive at the Olympic Village ahead of the summer competition, showed through a video on her social networks that the base is made of the aforementioned material.—ESPN
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2024-08-08 20:19:57
