How Paris Continues To Conquer Olympics Fans A Year After The Games

The balloon has gone up and Paris is once again enchanted. The elegant spherical creation that housed the Olympic flame during last summer’s Paris Games has returned to its floating perch above the Tuileries garden between the Louvre Museum and the Champs-Elysées, a central spot visible from many of the city’s grandest monuments and bateaux-mouches floating down the Seine.

En bref, Paris has mastered post-Olympic fusion tourism. Come for the, well, everything, and stay to check out the spot that has made for some of the most spectacular Olympic imagery ever.

With this coup de ballon, Paris has pulled off the kind of pivot most Olympic host cities have not been able to manage once the Games have ended. 1992 made a tourist destination of Barcelona and 2012 transformed London’s formerly downtrodden East End. In the shadow of these successes, there have also been some dismal failures: see de Janeiro, Rio, where the Olympic Park seemed to fall to pieces only months after the Games ended, and Sarajevo, where disused venues from the 1984 Winter Olympics are greatly in need of refurbishment following the Bosnian War.

From the Paris Olympics to the past

The helium-powered Olympic cauldron was imagined as a balloon in homage to the Montgolfier brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne. (The French word for hot air balloon is in fact montgolfier.) Jacques-Étienne piloted the first recorded balloon ascent by humans in 1783, setting the stage for Charles and Orville Wright 120 years later. Jacques-Étienne happened to launch his balloon in the middle of the Tuileries, and by no coincidence, the Olympic cauldron has been placed exactly where he took off for his fateful flight.

Newly rebranded as the “Paris cauldron,” the balloon’s rise over the city will be a nightly occurrence on summer evenings for the next three years. Though it appears to house a flame, the whole contraption is really trompe l’oeil: its golden glow comes from a combination of LED lights, mist-squirting jets, and high-pressure fans.

According to city estimates, Paris’s newest iconic attraction drew more than 250,000 admirers last summer alone. Less popular so far are the “baignades en Seine,” or sites where you can swim in the Seine River, an activity banned 100 years ago due to poor water quality but recently brought back in select areas and trumpeted as of the Games’s great legacies. (Daily quality testing determines whether the water is actually sanitary enough for bathers to dip into.)

More intriguing for the less adventurous may be the planned flotilla procession down the Seine set for July 27, a year and a day after the magically rainy Opening Ceremony that featured Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, and a bevy of small boats ferrying soaked and thrilled Olympic athletes down the river. New IOC President Kirsty Coventry will be among those in attendance.

Nor does Paris plan to stop at just the cauldron. Plans for a “Monument of Champions” with the names of the 2024 Olympians and Paralympians will also be revealed, while the half-submerged statues of ten extraordinary Frenchwomen that made up part of the river decor during the Opening Ceremony will be unveiled in their new residence near the Adidas Arena, which held rhythmic gymnastics and badminton and was one of only two new build venues at the Games. As the Olympics expands its reach, Paris of all places certainly knows how to prolong the magic of the past.