The 2024 Paralympics in Paris won't open in stadium
Paris organizers have announced their opening ceremony plans for the Paralympics
PARIS (AP) — The world's best Paralympic athletes, parading down France’s most famous boulevard with their prosthetic limbs, mobility chairs and stories of adversity, heading to a grand celebration of their prowess and sports on the Paris square where the French Revolutionaries of 1789 chopped off heads.
Paris organizers on Thursday announced their opening ceremony plans for the Paralympics, an event with 4,400 athletes that will follow the first post-COVID-19 pandemic Olympics in less than two years.
The attention-grabber is the venue itself: In a first, the Paralympic opening show will be freed from a traditional stadium setting and instead be held in the open in the French capital's heart, on the Champs-Elysées boulevard and the city’s biggest square, Place de la Concorde.
The once blood-soaked plaza, where King Louis XVI, his queen, Marie Antoinette, and other nobles were guillotined during the French Revolution that laid the first foundations of modern France, is shaping up as an eye-catching focal point of the Paris Games.
