The opening ceremony of the Paris Paralympic games will take place this Wednesday evening at 8 p.m. What can we expect?
The Paralympic Games begin tonight with the opening ceremony scheduled for 8 p.m. It promises to be exceptional, like the one at the Olympic Games on July 26. The show is scheduled to last 3 hours and will take place outside the Stade de France.
The 4,400 athletes representing 184 delegations will parade on the most famous avenue in the world: the Champs-Élysées. They will head 2 kilometers further down, towards the Place de la Concorde where four stages will be set up, with stands all around to allow 65,000 spectators to attend this extraordinary show.
Dance will have an important place in this ceremony with 150 dancers, and about twenty of them have a disability. On the costume side: Daphné Burki, the French stylist and presenter will once again be at the helm. Feathers, gold and blue-white-red are promised.
Concerning the guest artists, it will be a surprise since no names have been leaked. We only know that the electro DJs will be honored during the closing ceremony with notably Jean-Michel Jarre, Cassius and again Kavinsky on the decks.
The Olympic cauldron will be illuminated again at the end of the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games and will take off into the Parisian sky as was the case during the two weeks of the Olympic Games.
Who are the Belgians?
During this ceremony, our 29 Belgian athletes will parade. Our flag bearers are the 38-year-old rider Manon Claeys and the 35-year-old tennis player Joachim Gérard, both Olympic medallists. He won bronze in 2016 in Rio and she won bronze twice in 2021 in Tokyo. From these Tokyo Paralympic Games, Belgium brought home 25 medals.
14 of the athletes who won medals at the last Games are taking part in the competition this time. The aim is therefore to exceed 15 medals. Our biggest chances for titles are in athletics, cycling, para-dressage and table tennis.
More recent games
This is the 17th edition of these Paralympic Games, which are much more recent than the Olympic Games. They were born in 1948, more than 50 years after the Athens Olympics. It was a German neurologist who started it: after the war, he organized sports events near London for veterans injured in the Second World War.
You should also know that the symbol of the Paralympic Games is not the five Olympic rings representing the five continents, but three “agitos” which symbolize movement. “Agitos” means “I move” in Latin.
Finally, we speak of the Paralympic Games, because it is a contraction of “paraplegic” and “Olympic”. But with the participation of athletes with different disabilities, the prefix “para” now refers to the Greek “para” which means “alongside”, “in parallel”.
Paris 2024 Paralympic Games
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