The Paris 2024 Olympics explodes into life with what promises to be a spectacular opening ceremony on Friday, July 26, 11:30 a.m. (Mexico time).
This will be the first time that the Olympic Games opening ceremony will be held outside a stadium, with the parade of nations taking place during a boat parade along the River Seine.
A major milestone is that this year’s event will be the first-ever gender-equal Olympics, with the same number of women competing as men. No women took part in the first modern-day games held in Athens in 1896, and while 22 competed in Paris in 1900 (in tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian and golf), it wasn’t until 1952 in Helsinki that the proportion of women competitors exceeded ten percent. The number of women competitors has increased exponentially since then, with 34 percent of the total in Atlanta 1996, to 48 percent in Tokyo 2020.
As usual, the United States will take the largest delegation of athletes, with 592 registered as of July 16. Even host nation France will boast fewer: 573. Other nations with large delegations include Australia (460), Germany (427), China (388), Great Britain (327) and Canada (318). Mexico is taking 107 competitors to France. Israel has 88 athletes heading to the games and Palestine has eight. The nations with the smallest delegations are Belize, Leichtenstein, Nauru and Somalia, each with only one competitor registered. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian and Belarusian athletes will compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” without national identification. And 36 athletes will form the IOC Refugee Olympic Team Paris 2024, representing the world’s displaced population of over 100 million people.
In the 2020 games, the United States headed the medal table with 39 golds, followed by China (38), Japan (27) and Great Britain (22).
The 2024 Olympics features 329 events in 32 sports.