Paris: The global sports event, Paris Olympics, 2024 begins in France’s capital Paris today, featuring over ten thousand five hundred athletes from countries across the world.
The athletes will compete in thirty different games. The event will continue till 11th of next month.
The Olympics will officially open in Paris today. The July 26 opening ceremony will be held on the Seine River, which flows through Paris. The closing ceremony, which includes a parade of flags and athletes, will take place on August 11.
Some 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 private security staff will ensure the safety of the parade along the river Seine, its banks and surrounding monuments, in an unprecedented display of security.
More than 10,500 athletes will compete at the Olympics, 100 years since Paris last staged the Games. Competition started on Wednesday and the first of the 329 gold medals will be awarded on Saturday.
A procession of barges will take nearly 7,000 athletes along the river past Paris’s most famous landmarks, while more than 300,000 spectators will watch from the banks.
Starting at 7:30pm local time, in broad daylight, the ceremony, which marks the official start of the Paris 2024 Games, will pass by many of the French capital’s beloved landmarks, including the Louvre museum and Pont des Arts bridge.
“We’re going to take advantage of all the historic monuments around the Seine, and there won’t be a single riverbank or bridge that won’t be filled with music, dance, or performance,” the ceremony’s choreographer Maud Le Pladec, opens new tab has said.
It will the first time that an opening ceremony has taken place outside of a stadium.
Details including some of the artists taking part, who will be the last to carry the torch and light the Olympic cauldron to mark the start of the Games, have been kept secret.
The artistic team said they had been rehearsing in private to keep it all under wraps.
One big unknown for the open-air ceremony is the weather. It is currently forecast to be cloudy, while organisers were hoping there would be a “golden hour” of sunset lighting up buildings midway through the ceremony.
The competition actually began two days before the opening ceremony, on July 24, with preliminary rounds in archery, soccer, handball and rugby.
Pakistan has fielded seven athletes for the event’s swimming, shooting and athletics competitions, including javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem.
