The Olympic cauldron resembling a hot air balloon, lit on Friday evening by former athlete Marie-José Pérec and judoka Teddy Riner, will be accessible free of charge for the duration of the Olympic Games, according to Paris-2024 and the energy company EDF, which created this “100% electric” flame.
From Saturday, “and every day during the Games, 10,000 people will be able to come as close as possible to the cauldron, at a rate of 300 entries every quarter of an hour,” the 2024 Olympic Games Organising Committee (OCOG) indicated on its website.
“This opening of the Tuileries Gardens”, where the basin is located “from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., with a capacity set at 3,000 people present at a time”, “puts it within reach of the public during the day before it returns to the Paris sky at nightfall”.
On the ground during the day, the basin designed by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur will take flight every evening “at sunset” and “will be visible from hundreds of meters away to be seen by all,” promises Paris 2024.
The designer wanted to “make the object as accessible as possible, as visible as possible, as open as possible,” he explained Saturday morning. “Clearly, you have to go up in the air so that you can see it or catch a glimpse of it,” “not anywhere in Paris, but almost.”
“The idea of the balloon began to emerge. And then once you get into this idea of the balloon, of the history of the hot air balloon, you realize that in fact […] “The whole history of balloon inventions took place in France. The first balloon was in 1783. That was five years before the French Revolution. So, there you have it, we’re part of a story,” he explained.
For its part, EDF is making this “flame ring” the symbol of “a more responsible future, that of an electric future”, according to a press release.
The flame is actually a “powerful stream of light” projected onto a “cloud of water.” “The apparent simplicity of this solution, made possible by technological advances in LEDs, hides long hours of work,” says EDF.
It includes 40 projectors, says EDF, which specifies that “water consumption, of the order of 3 m3 per hour when the basin is in flight, is reduced to 2 m3 when she is on the ground in the Tuileries Gardens”.
Made of aluminum, it “meets the challenge of robustness and lightness,” says EDF. The positioning of the flame ring at a height of 60 meters at night implies “an unavoidable constraint of lightness, integrity and safety comparable to the requirements of aeronautical engineering.”
For Paris-2024, the torch expresses “through its symmetry a symbol of Equality”, while “the relay cauldron, taking up the pure and circular form of the ring, symbolizes Fraternity”. “All that was missing was Liberty to complete the national motto. Between earth and sky, the Paris 2024 Flying Cauldron is its perfect incarnation”.