Paris Olympics 2024: Event facts – surfing, breaking, mascots, Eiffel Tower | Paris Olympics 2024 News

The 2024 Olympic Games will begin on July 26 in Paris, France as 10,500 athletes will compete to get their hands on coveted sports medals.

Here are 10 things you need to know about Paris 2024:

Surfing in a land far away

While Paris is the main host city, events will be held in 16 other cities across metropolitan France.

The surfing competition, however, will be the most unique – taking place in the French territory of Tahiti, on the Pacific Ocean’s legendary Teahupo’o waves.

Located 15,000km (9,320 miles) away from Paris, the surfing venue will break the record for the furthest medal competition staged outside a host Olympic city.

But the competitors will gladly fly halfway across the world to get barreled in one of the planet’s most spectacular surf breaks.

Breaking: the new Olympic sport

The Paris Games will feature a new Olympic sport: breaking, an urban dance style that has its roots in hip-hop culture.

The competition will feature two events – one for men and one for women – and will be held August 9-10 in Paris following its success at the Summer Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018.

The Eiffel Tower will be part of the Olympics

The iconic Eiffel Tower will be part of the Olympics in more ways than one.

While the beach volleyball event will be held in a temporary outdoor arena under the tower, athletes will also carry a piece of the monument home as the Olympic medals will be adorned with original iron metal from the Eiffel Tower.

Parisians are on the run

For the first time in history, the public can have a first-hand Olympic experience, being allowed to run the same course of the Olympic marathon on the same day as the Olympians.

The mass participation event will feature 35,000 amateur runners.

Swimming in the Seine

The River Seine will host the marathon swimming event and the swimming leg of the triathlon at the Olympics, a century after it held some events during the first Paris Games in 1900.

From 1923 until recently, swimming had been banned in the Seine due to water-quality issues, and for decades, the river was too toxic for most fish. Paris organisers have repeatedly assured the competitors that the water will be clean enough to swim during the Olympics.

Meet the mascots

The Phryges are the official mascots of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. They are based on the traditional small Phrygian hats, a symbol of France.

Olympic organisers say the name and design were chosen as symbols of freedom and to represent allegorical figures of the French Republic.

100th anniversary

The 2024 Games will mark the return of the Olympics to Paris after 100 years. Paris first hosted the Olympics in 1900 and then in 1924.

The French capital will become the second city to host the Olympics three times, after London (1908, 1948, and 2012).

Full gender parity

Paris 2024 will be the first Olympics in history to achieve numerical gender parity on the field of play, with an equal number of female and male athletes participating in the largest sporting event in the world.

Out of the 10,500 athletes participating in the Games, 5,250 will be men and 5,250 women.

Lost in translation? Not on the Paris Metro

Paris’s public transport system (RATP) has provided more than 3,000 agents with AI-supported translation devices to help hundreds of thousands of tourists navigate routes during the Olympics.

The device can translate between French and 16 different languages.

Turn off the AC

There will be no air conditioning in the athletes’ rooms at Paris 2024, which has pledged to host the “greenest ever” Games.

Instead, buildings in the athletes’ village have been designed with a cooling system drawing water from underground, and facades adjusted so they get little direct sun.

 

⚽ Keep up to date:

You can follow the action on Al Jazeera’s dedicated Paris 2024 Olympics tournament page with all the news and features, as well as event build-up and live text commentary on selected football, basketball, tennis and boxing fixtures.