Summer Olympics torch relay

The Paris 2024 Olympic flame sailed for France on Saturday on board a three-masted ship to mark the final sprint of preparations ahead of the Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 26.

The "Belem" left the port of Piraeus in the morning for an 11-day voyage and will arrive in the southern city of Marseille, founded by the Greek settlers of Phocaea around 600 BC, on May 8.

The Olympic flame will pass by the site of the 2015 Islamist attack on the Bataclan concert hall as well as the Shoah Memorial as it makes its way through Paris in July ahead of the 2024 summer Games, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Tuesday.

The torch for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games was lit in ancient Olympia in a traditional ceremony on Tuesday, marking the final stretch of the seven-year preparations for the Games' start on July 26.

ANCIENT OLYMPIA - The torch for the Paris 2024 Olympics was lit by the sun's rays in a dress rehearsal in ancient Olympia on Monday ahead of Tuesday's official ceremony that will mark the final stretch to the Games in France.

The Olympic flame lighting ceremony in Ancient Olympia for the Paris 2024 Games will take place on Tuesday.

The Torch Relay across Greece will last 11 days, covering 5,202 kilometers and 563 nautical miles, featuring 600 torchbearers. 

Paris 2024 Olympic torchbearers may not all get to keep their torches as a cherished memento of the Games because organisers plan to cut down on the number made in the name of sustainability, a source told Reuters.

Greece's two-time Olympics taekwondo silver medalist Alexandros Nikolaidis died today at age 42, after a two-year battle with cancer.

Nikolaidis won his first silver medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and the second at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The Olympic Torch relay will officially kick start the countdown to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games on Thursday in Fukushima-120 days to the start of the rescheduled tournament that was rescheduled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Olympic flame will be on display until the end of April in Japan's northeastern prefecture of Fukushima.

Tokyo Olympic and prefecture officials held an official "handover ceremony" on Wednesday at the J-Village National Training Center in Fukushima.

This coming July, Japan will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. To mark the commencement of this outstanding event, the Olympic Flame was lit on March 12 in Ancient Olympia and the handover ceremony will be held at the Panathenaic Stadium on March 19 in Athens. Over the following four months, the Flame will travel across Japan via the Torch Relay route.