Paris wasted no time in making the Olympics its own, with an opening ceremony that had everything from a mostly naked blue Dionysus lounging on a barge to Marie Antoinette’s disembodied head as part of a heavy-metal band’s performance, to a ménage à trois. But the most unusual part of the 2024 Olympics might be the most traditional: the Olympic flame.
The flame that’s burning in the Olympic cauldron overseeing the games isn’t technically a fire at all. In fact, it’s actually a bit chilly.
The light that shines so majestically in the evening sky in a cauldron held aloft by a hot air balloon is actually “a cloud of mist and beams of light,” according to Olympic officials.
The cauldron is equipped with 40 LED spotlights and some 200 misting nozzles. Together, they create the illusion of flame and smoke, much like the recently departed Mirage hotel would do with its volcano along the Las Vegas Strip.
During the day, the cauldron sits in the Tuileries Garden. Every night, it is raised into the sky by what appears to be a hot air balloon. But the heat emanating from the Olympic flame is negligible, while the “smoke” is actually refreshingly cool.
The Paris Games are, in some ways, the environmental games. Officials in the French Organizing Committee made a conscious choice as they began to plan the festivities to be more environmentally responsible. The goal is to not exceed 1.5 tons of carbon emissions for the entirety of the Olympics (compared to an average of 3.5 million tons during an average Summer Games.)
Typically, the Olympic flame is kept burning in host cities by the use of natural gas, but doing so over a three-week period would make it impossible for Paris to hit its target carbon footprint goal.
Flame or no flame, the cauldron is a hit. Before it takes flight each morning, some 10,000 people come to see it in the Tuileries Garden. (Every available reservation slot has already been booked through the course of the Games.)
Tradition is tradition, though. And there actually is an authentic Olympic flame burning in Paris, though it’s not quite the spectacle Olympic visitors are used to. Tucked away in the corner of the garden is a small glass box, containing a tiny flame, that sits atop a white stand. Visitors who pay it a bit more attention will see the small sign affixed to the box reading, “Lit in Olympia, from the sun’s rays.”
That flame is the one that was first lit in April, eventually catching a boat ride to Marseilles and touring the country before a masked runner seemingly straight out of an Assassin’s Creed game dashed through Paris with it in hand during the opening ceremony, eventually handing it off to football legend Zinedine Zidane.
The cauldron housing the “flame” is 20 feet in diameter and roughly 90 feet high. It’s meant as a tribute to the world’s first hot air balloon flight, which Montgolfier brothers launched from the same location in 1783. It is raised nightly 200 feet in the sky, letting people throughout the city see it.
Per Olympic tradition, the cauldron will be “extinguished” during the Closing Ceremony, but Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo has said that she hopes the cauldron will become a permanent legacy of the 2024 Games, along with the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower and the statues of women that emerged along the Siene during the opening ceremony.