Greek actress Mary Mina, who plays the High Priestess, holds the Olympic torch aloft during the handover ceremony – Photo: Aris Messinis / AFP
On Friday, the organizers of the Paris Summer Games took over the Olympic flame in Athens, which is scheduled to arrive in Marseille on May 8, MTI reported.
The handover was held in the Panathinaiko Stadium, the central location of the first modern Olympics in 1896, approximately 20,000 spectators were present at the ceremony, the Greek and French national anthems were performed by the Greek singer Nana Muskkuri, the event was broadcast live on TV.
“We wish the organizers the best for the 33rd Summer Olympic Games in Paris,” said Kapralos Spirosz, head of the Greek Olympic Committee, who handed the flame to Tony Estanguet, president of the organizing committee.
The flame was lit last Tuesday in Olympia, and during the next 11 days it covered more than five thousand kilometers in the hands of 550 people in a relay race in Greece. Now, after the handover, it will be transferred from Greece to Marseille aboard the three-masted ship Belem. From the French port city, the torch will then set off on an almost three-month journey, which will touch more than four hundred French settlements and five overseas regions – French Guiana, Réunion, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe and Martinique – until July 26, before reaching the planned destination on the Seine to the scene of its opening ceremony.
The Olympic flame is always carried from Greece to the city hosting the Games in a different way, on land it usually travels in the hands of runners, but it has also been transported by plane and ship during trips between continents and islands. According to Wikipedia, its most unique transmission to date took place in 1976, when it was converted into a radio signal using a thermal sensor in Athens and transmitted to Ottawa, Canada, where a signal receiver connected to a laser picked up the signal and then ignited it again with the help of the laser.
