The Olympic relay comes to Paris to set fire – Libération

On Sunday 14 and Monday 15 July, the Olympic flame will travel through the capital, missing almost none of its key locations. A meticulously planned route, designed in great detail over months.

Sign up here to receive it for free every Friday our Libélympique newsletter.

It’s the story of a screen that wants to become a shop window and vice versa. On Sunday, July 14, the national holiday, and Monday, July 15, the Paris 2024 flame will cross the entire city, from the Louvre to the Butte Montmartre, with the delicate mission of relighting the Olympic spark, extinguished by the political crisis. What was not initially planned, but what all the organizers now hope for – from the Olympic Organizing Committee (Cojo) to Paris City Hall – is that the expected flood of strong images will finally make up for the procrastination twelve days before the opening ceremony. This route, designed for months and which has not been modified to take into account the political situation, “is a subtle blend of the heritage beauties of Paris, the human wealth of the capital and the DNA of the torch relay, the popular festival”, defends the relay’s deputy director, Grégory Murac.

A visit to the Louvre

Given that the event will be filmed all day, just after a tiny July 14 military parade due to the Champs-Elysées and Place de la Concorde being squatted for the future Games, and that the clips will be sent around the world via social networks, the relay designers have not skimped on the symbols. A bit of baguette and French cancan, “iconic” locations – the fetish word on all floors of Pulse, the headquarters of the Cojo in Saint-Denis -, a very large pinch of youth and stars, even if the list sent to the press on Thursday does not seem totally definitive.

Having left Marseille on 9 May, after a more than successful popular festival that put the Games on the right track, the flame will begin its Parisian journey escorted by the Cadre Noir riders of Saumur and carried by their leader Thibaut Vallette, gold medallist in Rio in 2016, before the Olympic football team coach Thierry Henry takes it out of the Champs-Elysées. It will then slalom along the left bank and cross the National Assembly before turning off towards Notre-Dame, the Senate or the Sorbonne. At the end of the day, having returned to the right bank – right on time for the news, which is obviously no coincidence – the torch designed by Mathieu Lehanneur will visit the Louvre. It should follow the path of an average tourist to come across all the museum’s masterpieces, from the Winged Victory of Samothrace to the Mona Lisa, passing through room 403, that of Michelangelo’s “slave” marbles, before passing in front of Delacroix’s monumental Liberty Leading the People, which was given a six-month makeover for the Olympic Games. This sequence gave rise to “about ten safety meetings with the fire brigade assigned to the Louvre. The film crews trained to move through the corridors so that we could only see the works and the flame,” says a participant in these meetings. In order not to burn the Mona Lisa, “we worked seriously but never in an anxiety-provoking way.”

540 carriers in two days

After the “Olympic concert” and the July 14 fireworks at the Eiffel Tower (only visible on TV), the flame will sleep in a luxury Airbnb – the gilded salons of the Paris City Hall – and will leave on Monday for a new loop in Paris, this time in the outer arrondissements, from the Bois de Boulogne to Belleville but also the Grande Mosquée, Roland-Garros or the Insep, the training center of the Olympic Blues, in the Bois de Vincennes.

On the porter side (there will be 540 of them in two days), among dozens of community workers, sports teachers, caregivers and Parisian personalities like Ludovic, the Paris garbage collector turned TikTok star, we find a mix of Olympic athletes and potential future medalists of the summer – Romane Dicko, Sasha Zhoya, Enzo Lefort – and some of their predecessors, like Marie-José Pérec or the fencer Laura Flessel. Lassana Bathily, a HyperCacher storekeeper who helped customers find shelter during the attacks of January 9, 2015, is one of the torchbearers and, to pay tribute to the victims of the Bataclan, the organizers asked the president of the Life for Paris association, Arthur Dénouveaux, to participate in the relay in front of the concert hall in the 11th arrondissement. They also handed over part of the baton to Kim Seok-Jin, the singer of the world-famous K-pop group BTS. “It’s like Jul (the rapper who lit the Olympic cauldron on the port of Marseille on May 8 and whose name had been kept secret until the last minute), analyzes a member of the municipal majority in Paris. It causes total incomprehension among parents but a “wow” effect among the youngest.”