Paul Rouget, Media365: published on Tuesday August 27, 2024 at 9:42 a.m.
Athlete Cyréna Samba-Mayela and Ryadh Sallem, member of the French wheelchair rugby team, will light the cauldron of the Paris Paralympic Games on Wednesday at the town hall.
While the names of the French flag bearers at the Paris Paralympic Games, Nantenin Keïta and Alexis Hanquinquant, were revealed in July, at the same time as those for the Olympic Games (Mélina Robert-Michon and Florent Manaudou), the identity of those who will light the cauldron at the end of the Paralympic Games opening ceremony, scheduled for Wednesday evening on the Champs-Elysées and at the Concorde, was not yet known. Deputy for sports at Paris City Hall, Pierre Rabadan announced at a press conference on Monday that it would be Cyréna Samba-Mayela and Ryadh Sallem, who will therefore be responsible for lighting the Paralympic cauldron in front of the Hôtel de Ville. The latter, aged 53 but not the oldest member of the French delegation, is “one of the figures of disabled sports in Paris”, Rabadan recalled.
Sallem has had several lives
A member of the French wheelchair rugby team, Sallem was also a swimmer, even achieving a world record in relays, but also a wheelchair basketball player, with three European championship titles to his name. Present at the London Paralympic Games in 2012 and those in Rio four years later, the player who has two European championship titles in wheelchair rugby has had many lives, and is also a social entrepreneur, an activist and a great humanist. At 23, Samba-Mayela was the only French athlete to win a medal at the last Olympics, taking silver in the 100m hurdles. The athlete who trains in the United States later admitted to experiencing “a little blues” after these Paris Games. “I spent time with my family, it had been a long time since I had seen them, it was good to be able to enjoy this medal with them, as with my managers and agents, confided the hurdler to L’Equipe. Two days later, I was able to resume training. It was not easy because there is a little blues after the Olympic Games. The fact that it is over when we had been preparing for this for years, it is not necessarily easy.”
