Heading to Marseille! Three months before the opening of the Paris-2024 Games, the three-masted Belem cast off on Saturday morning in the Greek port of Piraeus with the Olympic flame on board, triumphantly expected on May 8 in the Phoenician city.
The president of the JOP organizing committee, Tony Estanguet, expressed “great emotion” at the time of beginning this journey, having received the flame the day before from the hands of the president of the Hellenic Olympic committee Spyros Capralos during a ceremony at the Panathenaic Stadium.
“Now we are going to bring (her) back to France with this boat, the Belem, which also dates from 1896”, the year of the first Olympic Games of the modern era. “What a fantastic coincidence!” ” he added.
Flagship of maritime heritage
A 58-meter ship, this flagship of French maritime heritage, classified as a historic monument since 1984, was in fact built in the 19th century at the Dubigeon shipyard in Nantes.
It made 33 commercial campaigns until 1914 carrying goods from Brazil, Guyana and the West Indies in its steel hull. Victim of competition from steamboats, it was saved from abandonment by the Duke of Westminster who transformed it into a yacht.
Then sold in 1921 to the brewer Arthur Ernest Guinness, the Belem docked in Venice in 1952 to become a training ship, before being bought in 1979 by the Caisse d’Epargne, which created the Belem Foundation a year later to launch its restoration. .
Saturday morning, the three-masted ship was accompanied off the port of Piraeus by the trireme Olympias, an ancient combat galley which belongs to the Greek navy, and by 25 sailboats, in front of several dozen curious people who observed the scene under a hazy sun. behind security gates.
Spectators who should be much more numerous on May 8, upon his arrival in Marseille, created around 600 BC by the Greeks under the name of “Massalia”.
Some 150,000 people are expected to welcome him and an exceptional security system is planned, including 6,000 members of the police mobilized.
This arrival “will be the concrete start of a journey which will be fantastic for all French people,” said the Minister of Sports and Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, from Greece on Saturday.
According to her, it is also an opportunity to send “a message to the whole world to tell them that we will welcome them” and to put forward a “message of peace”.
On Sunday, the ship will first travel through the Corinth Canal, a 19th-century feat of engineering built with contributions from French banks and engineers.
Arrival under high security
Before entering the Old Port in May, the Belem will parade in the harbor of the Phocaean city and will be accompanied by 1,024 boats. Entertainment is planned on land and at sea all day long.
Still on the festivities side, Tony Estanguet announced Friday that swimmer Florent Manaudou, quadruple Olympic medalist and Olympic champion in the 50m freestyle in 2012, would be the first torch relay on French soil.
The next day the Olympic relay will begin in the city, with stops planned at the Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica or the Stade Vélodrome.
The flame will then cross the country, visiting the Antilles and French Polynesia in particular, to Paris, where the opening ceremony of the Games will take place, scheduled from July 26 to August 11.
All in a tense geopolitical context marked in particular by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
