“It was like being in a spy movie,” exclaims Jérôme Giacomoni, president of the company Aerophile, which designed the balloon carrying the flame. Months before the general public discovered the Olympic aircraft at the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, all the employees involved worked in the greatest secrecy to keep the surprise intact. “Our workshop, located on the banks of the Loire near Nantes, has the enormous advantage of being nestled in the middle of nature, among storks and egrets. It couldn’t have been quieter to carry out the final tests,” says Aurélien Meyer, artistic director of the Blam workshop responsible for creating the cauldron. “That was without taking into account the liveliness of the nearby firefighters.”
We had barely started to raise the “flame” – in reality a combination of water and light – using a crane when we saw them disembark, thinking it was a fire,” jokes Axel Morales, designer in charge of the project at EDF. Proof that the illusion was perfect!
Astonished spectators
Fire professionals are not the only ones to have fallen for it. On the opening night of the Olympic Games, on July 26, the billion viewers worldwide watched in amazement as the last torchbearers, Marie-José Pérec and Teddy Riner, advanced toward the majestic cauldron and lowered their torches before it “ignited” and flew into the sky, hoisted by a balloon. As early as midnight, the online reservation site for obtaining a pass to come and admire the flying object placed in the large pond in the Tuileries Gardens was stormed. Result: 110,000 tickets – free – distributed in 24 hours! In recent days, the few lucky people who have managed to obtain the precious sesame have been taking selfies and photos in front of the immense sphere, with some French people brandishing the tricolor flag or proudly sporting the “Paris 2024” T-shirt. The word that comes up most often? The “pride” felt in front of this flying object immediately adopted by a majority of Parisians.
Every evening, on the large esplanade of the Tuileries, the crowd rushes to see it take flight from 10 p.m., to the sound of impromptu concerts. “The initial idea was really to create this daily event at nightfall,” explains Thierry Reboul, the executive director of the Paris 2024 ceremonies. A successful bet. Mathieu Lehanneur, the designer responsible for designing both the cauldron and the Olympic torches, describes the “relay between the setting sun and the balloon that takes to the air at the moment when the Eiffel Tower begins to sparkle.” It was from him that the idea of making the flame fly was born. A slightly crazy project that allowed him, at the end of 2022, to make a difference and win the competition organized by Paris 2024 in which around ten designers participated. Very quickly, a second parallel adventure was added: that of EDF, whose Innovation laboratory had already been working for several years on the development of a fully electric decarbonized flame.
The study of several dozen prototypes will eventually lead to the final installation: a 7-meter diameter ring, integrating 40 LED projectors that illuminate a cloud shape created by 200 high-pressure misting nozzles. Not to mention these fans that make these water particles dance above the light and create this illusion of flame. A technological feat! The most difficult part was to guarantee the routing of electricity and water flows 60 meters above the ground when the basin is in flight. “We also came up against weight constraints since the balloon’s basket could not support more than 1.5 tons,” notes Axel Morales. Before adding: “There is also everything you don’t see, the immense machinery present on the underside of the Tuileries basin.”
The IOC is committed to this liturgy of the torch relay
The other challenge, and not the least, was to obtain the approval of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Until now, the Olympic cauldron had always hosted a real flame with fuel. “The IOC has always been very attached to this liturgy of the torch relay lit at Olympia. To this sacred fire transmitted across the seas, oceans, mountains… Would it agree to deviate a little from tradition?”, remembers Mathieu Lehanneur. A meeting was organized in 2023, with the president, Thomas Bach, who would end up being convinced, to the great relief of the team.
The choice of the site was not self-evident either and was the subject of lively discussions. Mathieu Lehanneur first expressed his wish to install the cauldron at the Trocadéro. “That would have placed it in the field of the Eiffel Tower, but this perspective was not desirable because we cannot compete with the Iron Lady”, observes Thierry Reboul who, for his part, advocates for the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, but comes up against the scepticism of the City of Paris. “That did not seem to correspond to the philosophy of these Games based on openness. For us, it was important that this symbol could be seen from afar and by the greatest number”, recalls Pierre Rabadan, the deputy for Sports, who says he put forward the idea of the Tuileries garden, insisting on the strength of the alignment of the work in the axis of the Louvre pyramid, the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe. “The arbitration was complicated because the Elysée was pushing for the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, the place where Emmanuel Macron celebrated his victory in 2017,” confided one of the actors at the heart of the negotiations. The presidency confirms that the Cour Carrée was considered among several proposals, but denies having expressed a preference.
The selection of this location was also favored by the Paris police prefecture. Installing the Olympic cauldron in an enclosed area would have saved the managers responsible for securing the site a lot of cold sweats. “You can imagine that we were not welcomed with open arms with our idea of sending an aircraft into the air powered by water and electricity, without an onboard pilot,” confides Mathieu Lehanneur. A lot of questions then arise: what will happen in the event of a storm? If the balloon falls? In the event of an electrical problem? If an armed man starts shooting at the aircraft? Finally, the other major difficulty encountered by the different teams responsible for developing the cauldron, the false flame or the balloon was having to work separately for reasons of confidentiality. “Everyone did the tests separately to avoid any curious people having the idea of taking a photo of the final work,” admits Jérôme Giacomoni, who only took his balloon into the Paris sky twice at 3 a.m. a few days before the opening of the Olympic Games.
Petitions are circulating for its preservation
The last unknown that kept the team in apnea until the end was the weather because although the balloon was designed to fly in rain or even hail, it cannot withstand strong winds. “The whole team felt an incredible emotion when the balloon took off. Especially since, as there had been no dress rehearsal, it was the first time we had seen the final result,” insists Jérôme Giacomoni. Since then, petitions have been circulating to keep the balloon after the end of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. On July 29, on France Bleu Paris, the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, expressed her wish to keep it, along with the Olympic rings hanging from the Eiffel Tower and the statues of the ten French women who appeared on the Seine during the ceremony, while specifying that she was not “the only one to decide”. “It will be complicated to keep the basin in this listed garden, which is why other locations are currently being studied,” says Pierre Rabadan.
While, for their part, those who campaign for the preservation of the famous sphere at the Tuileries emphasize the historical echo of the event: because it was precisely in this Tuileries garden that the first gas balloon flight of the physicist Jacques Charles took place on December 1, 1783 in front of 400,000 astonished people. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1878, it was again at the Tuileries that a French engineer, Henri Giffard, exhibited his invention, a captive balloon connected to the ground by a winch. “The ancestors of the balloons that we produce today,” explains Jérôme Giacomoni, who has thirty years of experience under his belt and can boast of flying 120 machines around the world today. Including the Generali balloon installed in the André Citroën park in the 15th arrondissement of Paris in 1999, on the occasion of the festivities of the passage to the year 2000. In 1995, during an interview given to L’Express, the young entrepreneur had confided his wish to fly a balloon over the Tuileries in homage to his illustrious predecessors. “Today, my dream is coming true”, sighs the one who now spends all his evenings there and does not seem in a hurry to come down from his cloud.
.