Eiffel Tower will keep Olympic rings permanently, mayor says

PARIS — The giant Olympic rings that were installed on the Eiffel Tower for the 2024 summer Olympic Games will become a permanent fixture on the monument, the mayor of Paris revealed Saturday.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that it was a “beautiful idea” to combine a quintessentially French icon, the Eiffel Tower, which was originally built for the 1889 World’s Fair, with a global one. The five interlaced rings of blue, red, yellow, black and green, which represent the different continents, were installed this summer between the tower’s first and second floors, more than 200 feet above the ground.

“I want the two to remain married,” Hidalgo said in an interview with Ouest-France, a newspaper.

The Eiffel Tower, one of the most widely recognized monuments in the world, with about 7 million visitors per year, has been a prominent symbol of this year’s Olympic Games, which ended in August, and of the Paralympic Games, which will end Sept. 8.

Medals won by athletes are encrusted with pieces of the famous landmark; Celine Dion made a triumphant comeback by singing from the tower during the opening ceremony; and the monument has become a stunning backdrop for beach volleyball and blind football.

Hidalgo said that she had written to President Emmanuel Macron of France to notify him, because the Eiffel Tower is “part of our national cultural heritage.”

“But as mayor of Paris, the decision is mine,” she said, adding that she had secured the agreement of the International Olympic Committee. The city of Paris owns the Eiffel Tower and is a majority shareholder in the company that operates it.

Hidalgo said the rings now installed on the monument — 95 feet wide and 43 feet tall — were too heavy to resist winter winds and remain permanently, and would be replaced “as soon as possible” by lighter rings made by ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant that made the current set.

“As long as we can keep these, let’s keep them; then we’ll put up others,” she said.

Hidalgo also said the city needed to come up with a system to “mask” the rings when the Eiffel Tower is lit up on special occasions — such as to support Ukraine in the war against Russia — because it could run afoul of the IOC’s strict neutrality rules.

The IOC could not immediately be reached for comment.

Hidalgo, who has been mayor of Paris since 2014, hopes to make Olympic-related achievements — including making the Seine clean enough to swim in — a key part of her legacy, and she said that she wanted the fervor and unity that were fostered by the Games to continue.

“Paris will never again be the same,” she told Ouest-France. Later, she added: “I want to keep this festive spirit alive!”

The fate of the Olympic cauldron, another widely popular landmark in Paris these past few weeks, is more uncertain. Hidalgo says she hopes to also keep the cauldron, which is lifted into the sky from the Tuileries Gardens every night by a gigantic golden balloon, as hundreds of onlookers ooh and aah.

But the site, next to the Louvre Museum, belongs to the French state, not the city of Paris, and some experts have expressed reservations about keeping the cauldron in an area that is governed by strict heritage rules.

“It’s up to the president to decide,” Hidalgo told Ouest-France. “But my opinion is that it should stay in the same place, because it’s an inseparable part of the Paris Games.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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