(Paris) Nearly fifty boats expected to welcome the delegations during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on the Seine, took part in a full-scale rehearsal on the river Monday morning, 39 days before the start of the Games.
This rehearsal, between the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont d’Iena, was initially scheduled to take place at the beginning of April but was postponed twice due to the excessive flow of the river due to the multiple bad weather conditions that marred the Ile-de-France spring.
A first rehearsal also took place on July 17, 2023, this time with around forty boats.
“The first trace of the first training session, we were very clearly a few minutes late,” recalled Thierry Reboul, the organizing committee’s director of ceremonies, during a press briefing.
“We learned from it, we continue to train and today we are very satisfied with the timing and the way in which the timing was respected. We are almost for all the boats, for each boat to the nearest second, we are very happy,” he assured. The boats should take 45 minutes to complete their journey. Fifty-five boats therefore set off from the Austerlitz bridge around 6:30 a.m. Monday morning, the circulation of the Seine having been interrupted at 4:30 a.m. for this test.
“The whole subject on which we train is that of timing, it is that of the capacity of the boats of course to sail together but above all to maintain a timing so that we can present our delegations to the place where we want it and almost the second we need them to be presented,” explained Thierry Reboul, director of ceremonies of the organizing committee.
On June 24, a test of the same nature is scheduled but this time with all 89 boats.
One of the big questions concerns the flow of the Seine, which increases with precipitation and makes navigation more difficult. “The flow of the river has decreased quite significantly and quite quickly. We are certainly still at a significant flow rate, but we are starting to be much closer to the conditions usually observed in July,” explained Thierry Reboul.
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics is to be held on the evening of July 26 along six kilometers of the Seine, in a new format on which the State, the organizers and the IOC are banking heavily.