The olympic flame of the Paris Games arrived this Wednesday in French territoryin the port of Marseille, in a grand ceremony led by the president, Emmanuel Macron, attended by 150,000 people and a thousand ships.
Throughout the day the Belem sailboat, which had collected the Olympic fire twelve days earlier in Piraeus, paraded its three masts along the Marseille coast before entering the Old Port of the country’s second city amid widespread applause.
The organizers wanted to include numerous symbols in the ceremony, with which they want to relaunch the popular fervor for Games that have not yet permeated the population.
The sunny day accompanied the festive atmosphere and ended with some rain which allowed a beautiful rainbow to be seen over Marseille.
On board the sailboat, the Olympic swimming champion Florent Manaudou passed the Olympic fire that had traveled in a candlestick to one of the torches through which he will make the journey to Paris.
The ship, the second largest sailboat in the country, approached the port at sunset and was received by the French Patrol, a formation of fighters that drew the Olympic rings with smoke in the sky of the city, which during the Games will host the sailing tests.
A pyrotechnic show accompanied the last meters of the ship in the port, while the city’s philharmonic orchestra played the notes of the tune that will accompany the Olympic events during the Games and La Marseillaise sung by the tenor Naestro played.
Once the ship was laid down, Manaudou descended with the torch in his hands and gave the first relay to the Paralympic athlete Nantenin Keïtawhich he passed to the rapper Jul, who was in charge of lighting the cauldron that marks the arrival of the Olympic firelit on April 16 in Olympia.
The organizers had kept the identity of the person who would light that cauldron a secret and there had been speculation that it was Zinedine Zidane, originally from Marseille.
The ceremony gave way to a series of festivities, marked by a great concert.
The flame relay will begin to travel across French territory this Wednesday and will end on July 26 in Paris at the end of the opening ceremony.
Until then, he will travel in the arms of 10,000 relievers through 64 departments of the country, including some overseas ones to which he will also go by boat, in one of the trimarans that compete in the round-the-world regattas.
The first relays, through the streets of Paris, will be carried out this Wednesday by some important sports personalities such as the basketball players Tony Parker or Nando de Colo, the footballers Didier Drogba, Jean Pierre Papin, Éric di Meco or the current captain of Olympique de Marseille, Valentin Rongier, the swimmers Fabien Gilot and Frédérick Bousquet or the fencer Pascale Trinquet-Hachin .
The reception ceremony for the Olympic flame took place amidst impressive security measures, with the deployment of 6,000 agents, the largest the country’s second city has ever seen in its history.
