In addition to the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower, should the cauldron and ball installed in the Tuileries Gardens be kept after the Paralympic Games? “I change my mind every other day,” replied the designer of the monument that lights up the Parisian sky every evening until the end of the Olympics on Monday, September 2.
After having pleaded for the maintenance of the cauldron at the end of July on RMC Sport, Mathieu Lehanneur appeared more skeptical this Monday, September 2, on the set of What Games!
“My first reaction is to say no. What we experience every evening, when we take off, we will never be able to find that moment again… And then the flame, its principle is that it lights up at Olympia, it acts as a relay (…) and it must go out”, recalls Mathieu Lehanneur. “We can’t keep it. It must go out”, he insists, not being convinced by the maintenance of a basin alone as “an object that becomes a souvenir”.
Macron is “thinking about it”
“It is a living being, powered by water and electricity, it flies and moves,” Mathieu Lehanneur also emphasizes. “Either we are ready to take care of it and we keep it alive, in a different way than the flame but we keep it alive, or we tell ourselves that we are not going to be able to do it and it disappears.”
A real attraction of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the cauldron has attracted thousands of people to the Tuileries Garden every evening since the start of the 33rd Olympiad.
On the political side, there seems to be a majority to allow it to remain in the capital. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, reaffirmed this week her desire to keep the cauldron in the Tuileries Garden. But the final decision will be up to the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, as the site is state property.
At the beginning of August, the tenant of the Élysée Palace said he was “thinking” about this subject. “We will look at all of this in due course with obviously the technical analyses, feasibility, perspective also because we must preserve the historical views of Paris. But I believe that in any case, it makes many people dream today,” he declared.
- RMC Sport
