Earlier than a crowd thronging the waterfront and hilltops of the traditional port metropolis of Marseille, the Olympic flame arrived on French soil on Wednesday, starting a 79-day relay throughout the nation and its territories that can culminate in Paris with the beginning of the Olympic Video games on July 26.
Florent Manaudou, France’s Olympic males’s 50 meters freestyle swimming champion in 2012, ushered the flame ashore from a historic three-masted ship, the Belem. It had left Greece on April 27, carrying the flame lit in Historic Olympia 11 days earlier than that.
After a department of the French Air Power, generally known as the “Acrobatic Patrol,” traced the 5 Olympic rings within the sky, Mr. Manaudou walked the flame alongside a short lived jetty crafted to resemble observe and discipline lanes, in entrance of a crowd estimated by native authorities at greater than 225,000. Fireworks erupted in plumes of crimson, white and blue smoke — the colours of the French flag — when he reached land.
President Emmanuel Macron appeared on with a smile, basking within the joyous environment of a metropolis he loves, as Mr. Manaudou handed the torch of to Nantenin Keïta, a French paralympic sprinter. The flame was then given to Jul, a preferred Marseille rapper, who lit the Olympic cauldron to wild applause.
“We wanted a robust image, a powerful image that in some way confirmed the radiant face of France,” Tony Estanguet, the top of the Paris Olympic Committee, advised France 2 tv of town, which was based some 2,600 years in the past. “Marseille is a metropolis of sport, ardour, and festivities.”
France has been the goal of repeated Islamist terrorist assaults over the previous decade, and safety was tight on Wednesday, with entry to the port space managed by greater than 6,000 regulation enforcement officers. Gérald Darmanin, the inside minister and a potential presidential candidate, known as the extent of safety “unprecedented.”
Lucas Poujade, 23, a enterprise scholar from the Auvergne area of central France, was on trip close to Marseille and determined to come back witness the festivities.
“That is as soon as in a lifetime,” he mentioned. “I feel folks from Marseille are proud and glad that the video games will not be solely hosted in Paris. For individuals who is not going to have the possibility to see one of many occasions, a minimum of this can be a solution to really feel concerned.”
Benoît Payan, the mayor of Marseille, was jubilant over a spectacle he described as transferring and stuffed with surprises. “We will say that Marseille is the Olympic champion of environment,” he mentioned.
The relay carrying the flame will start on Thursday. The torch bearers will embrace former star gamers for Olympique de Marseille, the native soccer membership. Amongst them will likely be Didier Drogba and Jean-Pierre Papin. Alexandre Mazzia, a three-star chef with an acclaimed restaurant in Marseille, who will present meals for athletes in the course of the Video games, can even bear the torch.
“I’m glad and proud to be a part of this distinctive occasion,” Mr. Mazzia mentioned in a short interview. He added that carrying the flame, for him, represented “values of fraternity, of engagement, of artisanal work and of French savoir-faire.”
The flowery relay will contain greater than 10,000 folks and can embrace France’s abroad departments in addition to mainland France and Corsica. The torch, on a type of grand tour of the Francophone world, goes to Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Réunion, between June 9 and June 17. It can make a primary cease in Paris on July 14 and 15, earlier than returning there on July 26 for its set up within the Jardin des Tuileries, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.
One thought behind the relay is to knit collectively France, which has not been completely persuaded by the prospect of the Olympics. A survey final month by the Ipsos polling institute discovered that solely 53 % of French folks have been within the Video games; some 37 % of individuals residing outdoors of Paris felt completely detached. Whereas curiosity and enthusiasm have been rising in latest months because the Video games strategy, there may be nothing resembling unanimity in France.
An opinion piece printed on Wednesday within the left-wing every day Libération and written by a number of native officers in Marseille, together with two deputy mayors, illustrated a number of the considerations.
“Let’s open our eyes,” they wrote. “The flame is arriving in a fortress Europe that has forgotten its traditions of greeting and hospitality,” they added, alluding to makes an attempt by far-right events to clamp down on rising immigration. The Olympics would injury the native setting, they mentioned, and in Paris “will speed up the phenomena of gentrification and expulsion of poor folks.”
Marseille is a standard rival of Paris, in sporting phrases and most others. Mr. Macron, a supporter of Olympique de Marseille, has been an everyday customer to town all through his seven-year presidency. He has tried, with solely partial success, to handle the acute social issues — medicine, violent crime, excessive poverty — that plague components of the Mediterranean metropolis.
“There are at all times doubts, there may be at all times a France that doubts, and a few amongst us who solely need to see issues,” Mr. Macron advised journalists after the ceremony. However, he added, “now I imagine we’ve entered the video games, the video games are right here, the flame is right here!”
Actually on Wednesday the environment in Marseille was resolutely upbeat. Music crammed the air and the sounds of horns rose from an armada of greater than 1,000 boats that got here to welcome the Belem below blue skies within the calm, glittering harbor.
The climate smiled on a metropolis that has recognized greater than its fair proportion of violence and hardship, whereas retaining a fierce satisfaction and the openness of a port metropolis. As a logo of the promise of the French Olympics, the selection of Marseille appeared apt.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
