Closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games: extinguished this Sunday, the cauldron could remain and keep alive a popular flame suspended forever

Moment d’émotion pour ouvrir la cérémonie de clôture, avec l’extinction de la vasque des Tuileries et la flamme récupérée par Léon Marchand. MAXPPP – Tolga Akmen/POOL

Le nageur Léon Marchand a récupéré la flamme à peine éteinte de la vasque olympique. Mais le monument éphémère pourrait bien rester en place aux Tuileries, souvenir et symbole éternel d’une quinzaine de liesse incroyable.

Suddenly, the flame went out in the Olympic cauldron. It became that original glow again in the hands of Léon Marchand, the one who had fanned it the most during these Blue Games. And the “ooooh” of the crowd, gathered around the Tuileries Gardens, held the anxious incantation of a tribe facing the disappearance of the divine light.

A disappointment on a par with the fascination that the “sphere” had aroused during the fortnight. Object of a nocturnal and pagan cult under which people took communion, loved each other, even danced as if in another dimension. Under a bell jar, sheltered from the torments of the world. We will see it lit again, of course, during the Paralympic Games, at the end of August.

Maintained in the Tuileries Garden ?

Here emerges, at the highest level of the State, the idea of ​​preserving this star that rises when the sun sets. The promise of a luminous parenthesis forever open in the depths of our souls. As if nothing that we experienced during this golden Olympiad could be completely extinguished.

A flame that traveled in a balloon every evening and transported a captivated crowd. MAXPPP – Alexis Sciard

To make exploits engraved in gold and silver, of all these moments of intensely shared communion, moments eternally suspended in the blue sky, at the hour when dusk falls on the party and nostalgia already grips us. Like at the end of a sublime match or an impossible love story.

It all started at 7 to end at 68 million

It all started at seven to end at 68 million in a Stade de France that must have felt a sense of déjà vu. France 98 and its atmosphere of unity around the slogan “black, white, beur” had not resisted the difficult returns to earth that follow the most beautiful balloon trips.

The almost perfect diversity and parity that have dressed the joys and sorrows of our heroes write another story of another time, more troubled and more realistic. Far from the excesses and the torments of politics, they have undoubtedly removed its capital letters and given all meaning to the expression “national rally”.

A wind of communion and madness tinged with a warm chauvinism, which France needed to sweep away the unbreathable atmosphere of weeks of fighting, here, elsewhere, almost everywhere in the world. It was a bit like opening the window to breathe in the fresh and festive atmosphere of a long summer night, at the heart of which Johnny's “Que je t'aime” became the tube again to commune in the light of our heroes. So happy to see, the enchanted space of a few days, champions govern our lives.

A crowd that wins and loses with its champions

The magic of the Games makes the crowd win and lose with them, magnifying like winners its basketball players who fail by an inch to open the door to legend. In the stands and fan zones, in cafes and offices, on the banks of the Seine or in the suburbs, we will be left with the image of a single France, united in the extraordinary Olympic space-time, in an ecstasy in the form of a release. No doubt between dream and illusion. So ideally massed in an airlock from which we especially do not want to leave.

Léon Marchand: “We will never relive it again”

Even Léon Marchand, promoted to guardian of the flame, comes to warn us: “I have never experienced this in my life and I think I will never experience it again.” We have a few summer nights left, over a few drinks, to accept its inevitability and convince ourselves that everything will eventually go back to how it was before.

In the moments of emptiness when nothing will go right anymore, beyond the photos on the soft discs of these children's games, images grafted into our memories like endorphin pumps, perhaps we will remain, like a pilgrimage in shape as a last resort, the return to the sphere of the Tuileries. The need to touch the concrete proof of a past happiness. As we cling to a dream that passes. Which has already passed… A balloon trip that will leave us light from all these starry memories. But the heart a little heavy knowing that we will never relive them.

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