The 2024 Paris Olympics are here. 6 interesting facts to know about the Games.
The 2024 Paris Olympics are set to officially kick off on Friday, with opening ceremonies set to start at 1:30 p.m. ET (7:30 p.m. local time), though some team events started on July 24.
For the first time in Olympic history, the opening ceremonies won’t be held in a stadium. Instead, they’ll be held on the Seine River, where an estimated 94 boats will parade athletes down the river that flows through the city of lights.
Here are some other tidbits of interesting Olympic facts you can put under your Phrygian cap as you tune in through Aug. 11, when closing ceremonies will take place. Let the Summer Games begin!
The Olympic rings
The five interlaced Olympic rings represent the union of the five continents — when athletes from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceana came together at one event. The five different colors — blue, yellow, black, green and red combined with a white background — represent the colors of the flags of all the participating countries at the time they were created, in 1913, by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee.
Events and athletes
There’s a total of 329 events among 32 different sports. The U.S. will participate in 31 sports, excluding team handball.
Team USA has the largest national delegation, with a total of 529 athletes.
Related from Yahoo News: For Olympic athletes, this is their moment ... on TikTok.
Making history with gender parity
For the first time in Olympic history, Paris 2024 will be the first to achieve an equal number of male and female athletes competing: Out of 10,500 athletes competing, 5,250 are men and 5,250 are women.
Read more:Are there any transgender athletes competing at the 2024 Olympics?
Olympic medal-winning athletes will have a piece of Paris
Bits of the Iron Lady will be embedded in the Olympic medals — for clarity, we’re talking about the Eiffel Tower, not former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Every gold, silver and bronze Olympic medal will include 18 grams of iron taken from Eiffel Tower renovation scraps in the shape of a hexagon, which is a nod to France’s shape and nickname — “l’hexagone.”
Olympic surfers will hang ten ... thousands of miles away
While Olympic events are occurring in 16 other cities in metropolitan areas of France — like sailing in Marseilles and soccer in Bordeaux — dozens of Olympic surfers will compete thousands of miles away (roughly 9,800 miles) in Pacific Ocean waters situated in the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, off the coast of the small village of Teahupo’o.
When not competing, the Olympians will also be living on the water in the first-ever floating Olympic village.
‘B-Boys’ and ‘B-Girls’ make their debut as newest Olympic athletes
Break dancing will make its debut on the Olympic world stage as the Paris Games debut Breaking as an official Olympic sport.
The sport had a successful debut at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the event far surpassed audiences for other sports, with 1 million viewers.
Breaking joins newer Olympic sports like surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing that debuted for the first time at the 2020 Tokyo Games.