It’s an insane journey so far.

It started in December 2022 when I was invited to be part of a design competition led by Paris 2024. They had selected 10 or 12 designers, and we all had to make a design proposal – or proposals – for the Olympic torch, relay cauldron and Olympic cauldron.

Yes. The Paris 2024 committee never tried to design by themselves; there were no design inspirations or mood boards. The main part of the brief was a description, one that asked: Who is Paris 2024? What is the ambition of Paris?…In terms of sustainability, in terms of generosity, in terms of the way of welcoming people. Who is this character? And from this description, I decided to pick up this philosophy of equality, probably first of all because equality is part of our French national motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Equality is in the middle of it, in a kind of symmetrical way. For me, the fully symmetrical shape for the torch was a way to embody this idea of equality. Because basically you’re playing with two equal parts. It was a way to express the same ambition, the same exigence, for the Olympics and Paralympics – and to express that, for the first time in history, there is a parity between male and female athletes.

First of all, I wanted to get… not an art piece, per se, but a sense as if you had sculpted the torch in one piece of metal. I didn’t want it to play on this idea of engineering, or technically complexity. An Olympic torch is quite complex, technically, for the fact that it can’t be extinguished whatever the weather condition; and so you have to include a complex system in it. But I wanted the object to appear as a kind of symbol, like hieroglyphs, in a way: super easy to read, super easy to remember. Actually, I wanted kids to be able to remember the object, to be able to take a pen and a notebook and design the torch by themselves. I didn’t want to add too many details, too much decoration, but for it to become kind of an immediate language for everyone.

Since birth, we have seen billions of objects – our brains, yours and mine and everyone’s, are full of references. And so it’s always tough [as a designer] to introduce a new symbol, a new language, a new letter into this large alphabetical collection of pieces that can imprint on your mind.

I also wanted to play on this idea of equality, and I wanted to bring the idea of the water – because the opening ceremony would take place on the Seine River, and the torch would arrive from Greece by boat, from Athens to Marseille in the South of France. Even during the torch relay, the torch took an amazing boat, a competition boat, and sailed to Guadalupe and Martinique. So, the idea of the water was, for me, a meaningful link for all the objects. For the torch, it appears in the ripples on the lower part of it, using this high-polished piece of recycled steel.

I didn’t present this idea during the competition stage. I came with the idea of making a flying cauldron – an object able to be visible from almost any spot in town, during the night and day. From there, we were considering, with the Paris 2024 team, how to find the most relevant way to create the flame, for both technical and safety reasons. Also it had to speak to the promise of Paris 2024 for a low carbon footprint.

And for the cauldron, of course, it makes sense. In the past, in order to get a big, bright flame, you had to use a huge, insane quantity of gas. But we couldn’t decide by ourselves. I mean, the first step was to find a way to create this flame – with EDF, the French electrical company – and then to convince the IOC. Since the very beginning of the modern Olympic Games, the flame was always one created with combustion.

So we held a demonstration for the head of the IOC, saying that we had something new that we wanted to share: a new type of flame. We opened the curtain and lit up the flame. What do you think? The response was, “Wow! It’s beautiful.” And after that, we explained that it’s a not real flame as you know it; it’s a flame made out of light and water. They were super impressed. They loved the visual impact and the fact that we reinvented not the tradition of the flame, but the way of delivering it.

I spent the opening ceremony on the Musée d’Orsay’s terrace with my wife and kids. And when the cauldron started to move up, I saw my 15-year-old-daughter start to cry and cry and cry and cry – it was impossible for her to stop crying. And for me, it was the very first clue that it was a success. Since the very beginning, I wanted to create a strong emotion at this moment. This is a goal for every single opening ceremony. My daughter, just a few minutes before was a teenager, you know? Easy, relaxed, chill. And at this moment, she turned and cried.

All the messages I received just afterward expressed the same thing: the idea of emotion, tears, goosebumps. And that’s been in my work since the very beginning. It’s super difficult to create a strong emotion with an object. A musician is able to do that: A musician with a symphony is able to send an invisible arrow to your brain and make you feel emotion. A writer is able to do that as well. But designers – who have to deal with materials, screws, wood, metal, whatever the scale – being able to touch this type of emotion is quite challenging. And frankly, this was my very first goal – not to make people cry for the sake of crying, but just to be sure that, okay, I’ve been able to transmit things to an object. It’s just an object, you know? And of course, it’s helped by the ritual, by the ceremony, by the iconic athletes, by everything. But at the end, it’s an object that’s just flying up with a flame. It was my goal, but I was absolutely not sure that I would succeed. The very first clue was my daughter.

That’s another kind of emotion. But this is, in my opinion, where Paris 2024 did an amazing job. They have been able, since the very beginning of the torch relay – in Olympia, which is supposed to be an almost religious moment (though one without God) on the ruins of the Olympic stadiums – and then going from that to super emotional moments with pop stars and dancing.

For a very long time, I have always tried to address the primitive core in us. I don’t care about trends, I don’t care about technique, I don’t care about forms – these are only tools that I can use. But my main goal is to try to touch this something inside all of us that talks about our dreams, our fears, our desires, our wishes, our frustrations, everything that is part of us. And sometimes I’ve been able to touch some points in that way – whether I was talking about different levels of population, about a vision of the future, about one’s relationship with their own potential death. And I can make people feel that. It’s like, Okay, I’d forgotten – but I’m alive! It’s a miracle. My heart is beating and I’m breathing. Holy shit, I’m alive! And I was not supposed to be alive in this term of biological lottery, you know? The fact that I am alive is just incredible.

All my work, all the materials I use, all the years and decades we spend with my team working with things – the only target is to try to touch something. And sometimes we succeed, sometimes not. And of course, with such a piece as the cauldron, it’s thanks to the context, definitely. I could create the same piece in my garden and invite my friends, and they would say, “Ah, you are crazy, Mathieu!” It might be beautiful, but nobody would cry. So, of course, I’m aware that it’s not the piece by itself, but in this context I’ve been able to send this invisible arrow to our primitive and collective core.

Yes, and let me just give you one example: Every single night, the Tuileries Garden is closed at 7pm. And from 7pm to almost 10pm, people are basically between the Louvre and the garden and waiting for the takeoff of the cauldron. On average, there are more than 10,000 people every single night, some people waiting for one hour, two hours, three hours. And a few seconds before the takeoff, when they just start to see the cauldron move, all the people say, “Shhh!” Everybody wants silence, and not for them to take some beautiful video without any sound – but just to go “Shhh…” in this overly noisy world. People are coming from everywhere, asking for silence, for every single one of them but also to collectively enjoy this few seconds of silence in front of something that is lifting off into the air. Wow! I could die tomorrow.