Meet the Olympic torchbearers of Paris 2024: Corsica to Hautes-Pyrénées

In May 2024, 11,000 torchbearers will form a relay to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic flame —and by association, the Games themselves —in France.

The flame will arrive in Marseille on 8 May after completing its voyage from Greece across the Mediterranean, where the first set of torchbearers will then receive the flame to start a new journey across France and its overseas departments and regions.

As we build up to the Opening Ceremony of Paris 2024 on 26 July, Olympics.com will profile a selection of the torchbearers each week. This week, we highlight the men and women representing the stages of Corsica, Aude, Haute-Garonne, Gers, and Hautes-Pyrénées.

Stage 6 – Corsica: Françoise Lippini

After her 16-year-old cyclist son died in an accident, Françoise turned her grief into action by founding the charity Adrien Lippini-Un vélo une vie. Determined to spare other families such heartbreak, she became a champion for road sharing and cyclist safety. Her tireless efforts to raise awareness and spearhead road safety initiatives were recognised in 2016 with the Ordre national du Mérite.

Stage 8 – Aude: Damien Crambes

Damien is a freelance entrepreneur in the music industry. A disabled athlete, he has a passion for boccia, which he has been playing since 2022. Damien has been competing in the BC1 category for two years. He is now sixth in the national ranking and hopes to continue gaining ground. Carrying the Olympic torch through his beloved home town, where he lives and indulges in his favourite sport, is a monumental honour for him. It is an extraordinary chance to shine a light on his sport and show the world that even a serious disability will not stop a determined person from performing at the highest level.

Stage 9 – Haute-Garonne: Jéromine Louvet

Jéromine has been a skateboarder since she was seven. She has been on the French national skateboarding team since 2017 and is chasing her dream of qualifying for Paris 2024. Her trophy cabinet contains a silver medal from the French street skateboarding championship, the 2016 French national championship in bowl skating and a silver medal in a European competition in 2019. In June 2023, she placed 29^th in the last Pro Tour for the Games, held in Rome.

Jéromine has teamed up with the local authorities in Castanet-Tolosan to launch a cooperative project for skateboarding facilities, resulting in the creation of a skate park around Lac de Rabaudy.

Stage 10 - Gers: Joël Bouzou

Joël was raised in a family whose lifeblood is sport. His father, a PE teacher, founded the Cercle d'Escrime et de Pentathlon moderne Gascon in 1961. Joël took his first athletic strides in this club, facing challenges head-on, including the lack of a winter swimming pool in Auch. Yet his unwavering perseverance led him to the French national team, in which he represented his country in four Olympic Games in Modern Pentathlon: Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984 (winning team bronze), Seoul 1988 and Barcelona 1992. In 1987, he made history as the first French world champion in the sport.

Beyond his athletic achievements, Joël has been a stalwart advocate for modern pentathlon. Since 2012, he has served as the vice-president of the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne, and in 2014, he took on the role of president of the French Modern Pentathlon Federation. In 2006, he was appointed as an advisor to His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco. The following year, Joël established the international organisation Peace and Sport. He has been the president of the World Olympians Association (WOA) since 2011.

Stage 11 - Hautes-Pyrénées: Roxana Papin Islas

Roxana stands out as a phenomenal sportswoman, with Guinness World Records in both cycling and rowing to her name —remarkable exploits achieved in 2012 that stand to this day. In addition to her sporting feats, Roxana, a former elite athlete, also served as a pundit for the television coverage of the London 2012 Olympics. She holds dual French and Mexican citizenship and runs a French sports coaching and bike fitting business (fine-tuning cyclists' riding position for the Tour de France) based in the Hautes-Pyrénées.

Roxana, a mother of two, has notched up impressive athletic feats, including tenth place in the 2019 World Triathlon Championships while still nursing her youngest child and having taken up the sport just 10 months earlier. Her sporting career has led her to train with the best in the business worldwide, from Australia to the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland, picking up seven languages along the way.