Here comes the sun: Teenage skaters fall and rise again at Paris Games

Japan's Coco Yoshizawa competes in the women's street skateboarding final during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Place de La Concorde in Paris on July 28, 2024, as the Luxor Obelisk is seen in the background. © Kirill Kudryavtsev, AFP

From our special correspondent in Paris – The sprawling skate park set up in Paris’s Place de la Concorde was packed with spectators on Sunday who came to cheer on some of the 2024 Olympics’ youngest champions. Unphased by the unrelenting – though welcome – sunshine, teenage Japanese skaters Coco Yoshizawa and Liz Akama won the gold and silver medals, with Brazilian icon and crowd favourite Rayssa Leal snatching bronze with her final trick. 

In the centre of Paris’s largest public square stands the more than 3,000-year-old Luxor Obelisk, dragged in the 19th century from its temple in Thebes and shipped down the Nile and across the seas to France to be raised in the capital’s Place de la Concorde, where royalty and revolutionaries in their turns fell beneath the guillotine’s blade. By now, it should be clear: Paris doesn’t really go in for half measures.