PARIS — After a spectacular Opening Ceremony on the River Seine, Marie-José Pérec and Teddy Riner lit the Olympic cauldron to officially inaugurate the 2024 Games here on Friday.
And it wasn’t just any Olympic cauldron. It was a seven-meter wide ring of flames topped by a 30-meter-tall hot-air balloon.
Olympic organizers said in informational material distributed to media that the cauldron was “a tribute to the first flight in a hydrogen-filled gas balloon,” which took place in Paris in 1783. In December of that year, the hot-air balloon became the first human-carrying aircraft when two of its French inventors, physicist Jacques Charles and engineer Nicolas-Louis Robert, took flight from Tuileries Gardens.