The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics will play out on the River Seine on Friday with the slogan — “Games wide open!”
The French capital is hosting the Olympics for the first time in 100 years.
The Olympics will run through August 11, with competition venues in places such as La Concorde, a major public square in the city. The program consists of 329 events across 32 sports.
Roughly 11,000 athletes from about 200 countries and territories will take part. Some 5,700 of them will compete in the men’s events and around 5,500 in the women’s.
The Refugee Olympic Team will consist of 37 members, eight more than at the Tokyo Games, making it the largest ever.
Athletes from Russia and its ally, Belarus, are not allowed to participate under their respective national flags due to the invasion of Ukraine. However, 32 of them are expected to compete as Individual Neutral Athletes, or AINs.
Organizers of the Paris Olympics aimed to make the Games more eco-friendly than in the past and reduce costs by using existing facilities as competition venues.
They also increased the number of mixed events to make the ratio of male and female contestants as equal as possible.