Paris Paralympics Flame Lit before Beginning Journey

AP

10:53 JST, August 26, 2024

Two weeks after French swimming star Leon Marchand extinguished the Olympic flame to close the Paris Olympics, the spotlight is now on its Paralympic counterpart.

British Paralympians Helene Raynsford and Gregor Ewan on Saturday lit the flame in Stoke Mandeville, a village northwest of London widely considered the birthplace of the Paralympic Games.

The flame will now travel to France under the English Channel for a four-day relay from Atlantic Ocean shores to Mediterranean beaches, from mountains in the Pyrenees to the Alps.

Its journey will end in Paris on Wednesday during the Paralympics opening ceremony — with the lighting of a unique Olympic cauldron attached to a hot-air balloon that will fly over the French capital every evening during the 11 days of competition.

The lighting ceremony of the Paralympic Heritage Flame was held in Buckinghamshire, where the Stoke Mandeville Games were first held in 1948 for a small group of wheelchair athletes who had sustained spinal injuries during World War II.

The man behind the idea was Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish neurosurgeon who fled Nazi Germany and worked at Britain’s Stoke Mandeville hospital. At the time, suffering a spinal injury was considered a death sentence, and patients were discouraged from moving. Guttmann made the patients sit up and work muscles, and hit upon competition as a way to keep them motivated.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I can feel his presence here today, no doubt about it,” said Andrew Parsons, the president of the International Paralympic Committee, at Saturday’s lighting ceremony, referring to Guttmann.

The president of the Paris 2024 organizing committee Tony Estanguet said that two weeks after closing the Olympics, the French capital was “proud and excited” to host the 17th edition of the Summer Paralympics, the first ever for France.

We are “ready to make it unique and memorable for France and the whole world,” Estanguet said.

The Stoke Mandeville Games later grew into the first Paralympic Games, which took place in Rome in 1960. The Heritage Flame ceremony in Stoke Mandeville was first held ahead of the London Paralympics in 2012.