Paris Olympics flame is lit at Greek cradle of ancient games
Cloudy skies frustrated efforts to produce the flame in the customary fashion where the sun is used to ignite a silver torch.
The flame that is to burn at the Paris Olympics was kindled on Tuesday at the site of the ancient games in southern Greece.
Cloudy skies prevented the traditional lighting, when an actress dressed as an ancient Greek priestess uses the sun to ignite a silver torch – after offering up a symbolic prayer to Apollo, the ancient Greek sun god.
Normally, the foremost of a group of priestesses in long, pleated dresses offers a prayer to the ancient Greek sun god, Apollo. She then dips the fuel-filled torch into a parabolic mirror which focuses the sun’s rays on it, and fire spurts forth.
But this time she did not even try, going straight for the back-up, kept in a copy of an ancient Greek pot.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said the flame lighting combined “a pilgrimage to our past in ancient Olympia, and an act of faith in our future”.
“In these difficult times … with wars and conflicts on the rise, people are fed up with all the hate, the aggression and negative news,” he said. “We are longing for something which brings us together, something that is unifying, something that gives us hope.”
The first torchbearer is Greek rower Stefanos Douskos, a gold medallist in 2021 in Tokyo. He ran to a nearby monument that contains the heart of French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the driving force behind the modern revival of the games.
The flame will now travel from Athens’ port of Piraeus on the Belem, a French three-masted sailing ship built in 1896 — the year of the first modern games in Athens.
According to Captain Aymeric Gibet, it is due on May 8 in the southern French port of Marseille, a city founded by Greek colonists some 2,600 years ago.
The Belem arrived in Katakolo, near Olympia, on Monday. Lookers-on included a group of tourists from the northwestern French region of Brittany, where the ship’s homeport of Nantes is, waving French and Breton flags.
But Mr Pasquet said he would have to watch the Paris Games from home.
“For us, it would be really very expensive, unaffordable,” to go to the venues, he said. “So we’ll watch them on television … from our armchairs.”
