“I want the two to remain married,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris said in a newspaper interview.
The giant Olympic rings that were installed on the Eiffel Tower for the 2024 summer Games will become a permanent fixture on the monument, the mayor of Paris revealed on 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,” Ms. Hidalgo said in an interview with Ouest-France, a newspaper.
The Eiffel Tower, already one of the most widely recognized monuments in the world, with about seven million visitors per year, has been a prominent symbol of this year’s Olympic Games, which ended earlier this month, and of the Paralympic Games, which will end on 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.
Ms. 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.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
