The Paris 2024 Olympics kick off this Wednesday with the first football and rugby sevens games ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday at 7:30 pm CET.
The games will run until 11 August, but the hype is already huge. This edition has sold more tickets (8.6 million) than any previous summer Olympics, organisers said in July, overtaking Atlanta 1996's 8.3 million.
More than 1 million tickets have already been sold for the Paralympics as well.
The 33rd edition of the games is held across 35 venues, mainly in Paris but also in other French cities like Lille, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, and the Pacific island of Tahiti.
Paris 2024 will have a strong urban focus, with several competitions held at iconic places like the Champs-Élysées, the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, Invalides, and Pont Alexandre — with the aim of keeping athletes and citizens as close as possible.
Paris has been spruced up with a monumental operation to clean the Seine, and many venues have been renovated to avoid erecting new buildings, as Paris 2024 aims to reduce the carbon footprint by 50% compared to the previous games.
Paris' Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre III. The Grand Palais will host fencing and taekwondo and Pont Alexandre III will host Cycling road, Marathon swimming and Thriatlon AP/Aurelien Morissard