All you need to know about the Paris 2024 Olympics

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games will showcase 3,800 hours of live sport and award 329 gold medals in 32 sports over 18 days of competition across the capital and in other parts of France.

Here is all you need to know about the 34th summer Olympics.

The opening ceremony to signal the official start of the Paris 2024 Olympics will be held on Friday, 26 July.

But the sporting action actually begins on Wednesday, 24 July with pool matches in football, rugby sevens, handball and archery.

The ambitious opening ceremony will take place along the River Seine instead of in a stadium.

The first medals will be awarded a day later and competition will conclude on 11 August, with the closing ceremony later that evening.

The women’s 100m final will be held at 20:20 BST on Saturday, 3 August, and a little over 24 hours later, at 20:50 BST on 4 August, it will be the men’s 100m final. Both will take place at the Stade de France, where all the track and field events are being held.

There are 329 gold medal events at Paris 2024 with a whopping 39 medals being won on the penultimate day of competition, Saturday, 10 August.

The first medal of the Games will be in shooting – mixed team air rifle – and that is expected to be won at 10:30 BST on Saturday, 27 July.

The final medal will be awarded in women’s basketball at 16:30 BST on Sunday, 11 August.

The only new sport for the 2024 Olympics is breaking. It is a style of dance that originated in the Bronx in New York during the 1970s but has has evolved to become a competitive sport.

In Paris, breaking will not be seen until the latter part of the Games, with the women’s event taking place on 9 August and the men’s on 10 August. A total of 32 entrants, 16 men and 16 women will compete for the medals.

Baseball/softball and karate both featured in Tokyo three years ago but have been dropped for these Olympics.

Other tweaks to sports include a change in format for sport climbing. In Tokyo, there was only one medal on offer for both the men and women but in Paris there will be a combined medal for lead and bouldering and a separate medal event for speed climbing.

Kayak cross will also makes its debut. It is a form of canoe slalom but four athletes in each heat race against each other, not just the clock.

In sailing two kite events have been added to the programme, windsurfer – iQFoil and kiteboarding.

And in artistic swimming, men are included for the first time in Olympic history and there will also be a team acrobatic routine round making its debut.

Team GB have finalised their squad for the Games with 327 athletes set to take part, external across 24 different sports.

They won 64 medals in Tokyo and data experts Nielsen Gracenote currently predict a total of 62 in Paris.

Meet Olympic Phryge.

The name is based on the traditional small Phrygian hats the Olympic and Paralympic mascots are shaped after.

It is a symbol of freedom through French history and represents allegorical figures of the French republic.

The motto of the mascots is “Alone we go faster, but together we go further.”

World Athletics has announced it will become the first international federation to award prize money at the Olympic Games.

The global governing body said a total prize pot of $2.4m (£1.9m) has been made available for this summer’s Olympics in Paris, with gold medallists receiving $50,000 (£39,400). – bbc.com