The journey of the sacred fire of the
Olympics towards Paris 2024
begins . The countdown to minus 100 days begins on Wednesday, and the Olympic flame that will burn for the duration of the Olympic Games in France this summer will be lit tomorrow in Olympia, Greece during a ceremony that harks back to the traditions of Ancient Greece.
The Olympic flame will arrive in Athens ahead of the handover ceremony to the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee at the Panathenaic Stadium on Friday 26 April, with the event starting at 5.30pm. After the ceremony, the flame will spend the night at the French Embassy in Athens, before boarding the Belem (a famous three-masted ship first launched in 1896) the following day to head to Marseille, France , where it will arrive with great fanfare on May 8th.
The very idea of the Olympic flame comes from the ceremonies of the ancient Games, which took place in Olympia, Greece, in the very place where the Paris 2024 Olympic Flame Lighting Ceremony will take place.
For the ancient Greeks, fire was a sacred element and perpetual fires were kept in front of their main temples. During the ancient Olympic Games, a flame burned perpetually on the altar of the sanctuary of the goddess Hestia; other fires were lit in the temples of Zeus and Hera. Today, the Olympic flame is lit in front of the ruins of the temple of Hera by an actress playing the part of the priestess, who uses a parabola (known to the ancient Greeks as Skaphia) to concentrate the sun's rays and light the Torch.
The Olympic flame is placed in an urn and brought to the ancient stadium by Estiada (the priestess guardian of the fire), where it is handed over by the high priestess to a torchbearer together with an olive branch, a universal symbol of peace.
The torchbearer then carries the flame to the Coubertin Grove, on the site of the International Olympic Academy, where it is used to light an altar next to the monument where the heart of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, is buried. At this point, the torchbearer passes the Olympic flame to a second torchbearer, representing the host country of the Olympic Games - for 2024, of course, France. The Olympic flame will then cross the whole of Greece during an 11-day relay, in which more than 550 torchbearers will carry the torch.