Olympic Games 2024: torch extinguished, hoax, jaguar shot and birds roasted: the turbulent history of the Olympic flame

Since the creation of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, the Olympic flame, whose route for the 2024 Olympics in Paris will be unveiled on Friday, has experienced a few adventures:

Student joke or genius cheat, the most memorable incident dates back to 1956. That year, a young Australian student, Barry Larkin, managed to fool everyone with a homemade torch, in which... underwear.

By an unlikely combination of circumstances, Barry Larkin, who had planned a fake motorized escort, found himself surrounded by real police bikers when he broke into a run, to the cheers of the crowd, all the escort to Sydney Town Hall.

At the top of the steps, the mayor of the city received the torch from his hands. It was by attacking his speech that the city councilor became aware of the deception.

It was to be one of the symbolic images of the relay leading the flame to Rio de Janeiro in 2016. During one of the stages through the Amazon rainforest, it was to be greeted by Juma, a 17-year-old female jaguar, symbol of an endangered species in the Brazilian forest.

Unfortunately, while moving, Juma runs away. Four tranquilizer darts are not enough to stop it, the animal attacks a trainer. The soldiers are forced to shoot him.

The pinnacle of the relay, the burning of the Olympic cauldron has often been the occasion for memorable images, whether it is an archer shooting the flame towards the cauldron in Barcelona in 1992 or the famous boxer Mohamed Ali, victim of Parkinson's disease, lighting up, despite its tremors, that of Atlanta four years later.

But sometimes things don't go as planned, as in Seoul in 1988. Released a few moments earlier, dozens of doves approached the basin when it was on fire. Several birds will be roasted under the horrified eyes of the spectators.

Demonstrations are a classic of the Olympic relay that offer gigantic media exposure. They were particularly marked in 2008, when the defenders of Tibet took advantage of the Beijing Games to demonstrate: in Paris, the flame ended its race on board a bus because of the scuffles.

During the journey to Sydney in 2000, a spectator took the flame from surfer Tom Carroll's hands without showing any motivation and tried to throw it into the port of Kiama, south of Sydney, before being tackled to the ground. A high school student also tried to extinguish the torch with a fire extinguisher.

In 2012, the Olympic flame, eternal according to legend, had to be rekindled in disaster after being extinguished while it was on the chair of Paralympic badminton star David Follett, blown away by a gale in the south- west of England.

During the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, the Olympic torches, produced by a Russian missile manufacturer, went out several times, before being discreetly reignited by members of the secret services.

In 2020, the flame's journey was stopped short by the Covid-19 pandemic: it arrived in Tokyo on March 19, 2020, and only resumed its journey on March 25, 2021. For a year, it remained lit in the Olympic Museum in the Japanese capital. During his journey to the Olympic stadium, the few spectators, masked, were asked not to applaud for fear of spreading the virus.

As the Olympic Museum website recalls, “over the past 80 years, the Olympic flame has been carried by hundreds of thousands of people and has traveled in every way possible and imaginable”. From space to the seabed, via the summit of Everest, the flame has known it all.

The Olympic flame did not appear in 1896 in Athens but in 1928 in Amsterdam. As for the relay, if it has its roots in ancient Greece, its modern version was born on the occasion of the Berlin Games of 1936, by the will of the Nazi regime.