Laure Manaudou, who took down American triple Olympic champion Janet Evans‘ 1988 World record in the 400m free in 2006 after almost 18 years, will receive the torch from Greek Olympic rower Stefanos Douskos in Greece. Each Olympic cycle, the torch is lit in Olympia before being transported in the relay for around 70-80 days before being used to light the Olympic Flame at the Games, wherever they are being held.

Some 11,000 runners take part in the relay, including community achievers and leaders from villages, m towns and cities along the relay route, the cost estimated at around $450,000 for each of the 70-plus days or a total of more than $30 million. This year, the torch will travel through about 700 cities in 60 regions in France. The Torch is schedule to reach France in Marseille on May 8.

Manaudou’s connection to Greece, home of the Modern Games in 1896, is eternal: alongside gold in the 400m freestyle in 2004, Manaudou claimed silver in the 800m freestyle and bronze in the 100m backstroke in Athens.

Two years later in May 2006, she clocked 4:03.03 to break Evans’ World record of 4:03.85 at a meet in Tours. She improved the global standard to 4:02.13 for the European title in Budapest in August.

She claimed two golds (200 and 400m free), two silvers (800m free and 100m back) and a bronze (4x200m free) at the Melbourne 2007 World Championships. In the 200m freestyle semis, Italian Federica Pellegrini, the Lioness of Verona, broke German Franziska van Almsick‘s 2002 World record of 1:56.64 in 1:56.47. The next day, Manaudou claimed the crown in 1:55.52.

After the Championships, Manaudou quit her coach Philippe Lucas and France for as life in Italy with Luca Marin, a medley swimmer on the national team. The relationship ended when Marin started to go out with Pellegrini.

In 2008 at the Beijing Olympic Games in the first season in which suits included no-textile material such as polyurethane, Pellegrini took back the 200m record in heats in 1:55.45 before claiming Olympic gold two days later in morning finals in 1:54.82.

Manaudou was missing from the 200m heats, which unfolded on the evening of the same day as the 400m final that had gone things dreadfully wrong for both the French and Italian swimmers who had been tipped among favourites for gold.

Pellegrini was fifth in 4:04 and Manaudou eighth in 4:11, the race won by Great Britain’s Rebecca Adlington in 4:03.22 ahead of American Katie Hoff, 4:03.29, and the champion’s teammate Joanne Jackson, 4:03.42. Adlington went on to win a second gold, in the 800m by 6sec in a World record of 8:14.10. That broke Janet Evans’ other long-standing record, of 8:16.22, in place since 1989.

Meanwhile, Pellegrini’s 1:55.45 was the second of her six world records down to a 1:52.98 in a “shiny suit” in Rome at the July 2009 World Championships that featured the last generation of non-textile suits banned from January 1, 2010.

The suits were named shiny by this author because the material, when wet, resembled the sheen on an inflated balloon in which, mirror-like, you could see your reflection. The snag of a nail was enough to rip the suits, too, at several hundred dollars a pop at that, too.

Pellegrini excelled in Rome, claiming the 200 and 400m World titles in global standards. By then Manaudou had announced her retirement but in October 2010 she made a comeback to training, basing herself in the United States with the Auburn University Tigers swim team. She made her return to competition on July 14, 2011, in Tigers colours at a small swimming meet in, yes, Athens, just not that one, but the one in Georgia, USA, clocking 25.93 in heats and 25.84sec in the final of the 50m freestyle, both times the fastest freestyle dashes of her career.

Manaudou raced at her third Olympics at London 2012, finishing 7th in the 100m backstroke and 15th in the 200m backstroke as a semi-finalists. Although references also suggest she raced the backstroke leg of the France medley relay, the heats quartet finished 11th less than a second from qualifying for the final that Manaudou had been expected to race in.

Laure Manaudou did, however, make history at London 2012: the older sister of Florent Manaudou, she cheered him on to gold in the 50m freestyle, his victory making Laure and Florent the first siblings in history to each claim individual gold medals in solo events at the Olympic Games.

After retiring, she went out with French sprinter Frédérick Bousquet and the couple had a daughter, Manon. The relationship did not last and Manaudou later met Jérémy Frérot, singer in the French duo called Fréro Delavega, which enjoyed popularity after participating in The Voice. The couple have two sons together, while Frérot also has a son from a previous partnership.

Florent, meantime, went on to claim silver in the freestyle dash at both the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 202One Olympics as well as eight World titles (four long- and four short-course) and 11 European crowns (six of them long-course). He is married to fellow 50m freestyle Olympic champion Pernille Blume, the Danish sprinter who claimed gold at the Rio 2016 Games.

Manaudou and Blume, based in Antibes, are expected to make their respective national Olympic teams for the Paris Games this summer, while siblings Florent and Laure will serve as two of four French captains of the torch relay, alongside triathlete Mona Francis and long jumper Dimitri Pavadé.