Paris 2024 to sell 400,000 tickets next week, 7.2 million already sold
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Paris 2024 is hoping to sell 10 million tickets for the July 26-Aug 11 Summer Games.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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PARIS – Some 400,000 tickets for the Paris 2024 Olympics will go on sale in the last week of November, organisers announced on Nov 22.
Paris 2024 is hoping to sell 10 million tickets in total for the July 26-Aug 11 Summer Games and has already sold 7.2 million, chief operating officer Michael Aloisio said.
“I don’t think any other organising committee had sold that many tickets so fast,” he added.
Paris 2024 has come under fire for the prices of some tickets but said on Nov 22 that a third of the newly issued tickets would be “under €50 (S$73)” across all disciplines, apart from surfing.
Some 30,000 of the tickets available on Nov 30 will be for athletics sessions with another 24,000 for tennis. Tickets for the opening ceremony – a barge parade on the Seine river – will cost between €90 and €2,700.
The organising committee is also looking to sell 2.8 million tickets for the Paralympics and said it would give details on the progress at the end of 2023.
“We’re happy with the way it started,” Aloisio said. “We need time for people to know who the athletes are.”
Meanwhile, Greek Olympic rowing champion Stefanos Ntouskos will be the first torchbearer in the relay that will travel from Olympia to Paris for the Games, the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) announced on the same day.
Ntouskos, 26, became Greece’s first-ever rowing gold medallist when he won the single sculls in Tokyo in 2021.
The Olympic flame ceremony will take place on April 16 on the ancient site of Olympia. Around 600 torchbearers will then carry the Olympic flame on a 5,000km odyssey around Greece, before reaching the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, site of the first modern Olympics in 1896, on April 26.
The last Greek torchbearers will be players from the men’s water polo team, who won silver in Tokyo.
The flame will then leave Piraeus for Marseille aboard the three-masted sail training ship Belem, a listed historic monument.
It will arrive in France on May 8, just over 2½ months before the start of the Games, where it will be used to light the Olympic flame.
“Greece and France are united by strong ties of cooperation and solidarity. Paris will host superb Olympic Games and show the greatness of the French people,” said Spyros Capralos, president of the HOC.
“Even more important for us are the very special messages that the Olympic flame carries with it.
“Especially at a time when there are wars in many parts of the world. At such a time, it is peace, cooperation, noble rivalry, the ideals of Olympism that can rekindle the flame of hope.”
The first Olympic torch relay took place in 1936 when 3,000 bearers delivered it from Olympia to Berlin. REUTERS, AFP
