Creating Fire With Water And Light: The 2024 Olympic Flame | Live Design Online

A long list of celebrities —including Snoop Dogg — and international sports figures – including French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane — carried the 2024 Olympic torch through 450 towns and cities across 65 regions, including five overseas territories, and covered 17,000 kilometers over three months. The relay continued into Paris on Friday, July 26 for the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games, with a hooded runner dashing across Parisian rooftops, then handing the torch to Zidane, then to Rafael Nadal, who got into a boat with sports legends including Serena Williams, then to a series of Olympic champions, and on to the final torchbearers, Olympic gold medalists Teddy Riner and Marie-José Perec, who together performed the traditional role of transferring the torch-based flame to the Olympic cauldron. A ring of fire then powered a 30-meter-high hot air balloon to rise up into the night sky above Paris in a spectacular display.

But guess what? There is no actual flame involved in this ring of fire!

Imagined by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, this giant hot air balloon is a tribute to French pioneers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier, who built the original hot air balloon piloted by humans in November 1783. This one was built in conjunction with the EDF (French National Electric Company) in Nantes, France.

A meticulous combination of a cloud of mist and beams of light, the Olympic Flame flickers with electricity as its sole source of energy. As part of its partnership with Paris 2024, EDF is supplying 100% renewable electricity produced in France to power the Olympic venues, which now include the cauldron.

Visible and warm, this "flame" is also a technical feat. The ring of fire, almost seven meters in diameter, incorporates 40 LED spotlights to illuminate the cloud created by 200 high-pressure misting nozzles. EDF also succeeded in guaranteeing the flow of electricity and water 60 meters above the ground, when the cauldron is in flight.

Back-lit, the water mist looks like flames; very little CO2 is produced, in keeping the Games’ “green” promise, and the end result is the illusion of a flame to give the flickering and smoke effect of real flames: more sustainable in terms of energy than a classic flame that burns fossil fuel.

During the day, the balloon rests in the Jardin des Tuileries, the gardens of Le Louvre, where visitors can see it up close, but at sunset it rises to a 60-meter height (while remaining tethered to the ground with an electronic control panel to manage the flight), floating above the monuments of Paris until 2am, every night through September 8, 2024.