Let’s go on the big journey. After being handed over to France on Friday and having spent the night at the French embassy in Athens, kept in an Olympic lantern, the flame began its journey to France on Saturday aboard the three-masted barque Belem, a ship of the Nineteenth century.
It was the head of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop), Tony Estanguet, who brought the flame to Belem. The departure of the Belem, with its 16 young scouts selected by the Caisse d’Épargne to escort the flame, took place this Saturday a little before 10 a.m. from the port of Piraeus. Direction the Corinth Canal, currently under maintenance, but which will be exceptionally open to let the majestic three-masted ship pass, then Sicily, Corsica and Marseille, where it will dock in the Old Port, on May 8 at 7 p.m., after a day of parade in the harbor.
It is swimmer Florent Manaudou who will then have the honor of being the first bearer of the flame on French soil.
“It’s such a great emotion,” declared on this occasion Tony Estanguet, president of the JOP organizing committee, who had symbolically received the flame the day before in Athens, from the hands of the president of the Hellenic Olympic committee Spyros Capralos.
“Now we are going to bring (her) back to France with this boat, the Belem, which also dates from 1896”, the year of the first Olympic Games of the modern era, “what a fantastic coincidence!” ” he added.
After arriving in the Old Port on May 8, the flame will begin its journey to France. It will cross the country through 450 cities, also passing through the Antilles and French Polynesia, to arrive in Paris on the day of the opening ceremony of the Games, July 26. The event will be held until August 11 in an international climate marked in particular by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
From Athens, the Minister of Sports Amélie Oudéa-Castéra hoped, during a press briefing, that “these Games will allow the emergence of a new standard in the organization of major sporting events”. She recalled that these Olympic Games would be the first in history to be “ecological, equal and decentralized”, with events in 73 communities.