Lilou Ruel, a 21-year-old French freerunner, has revealed she was the only female to play the masked Olympic torchbearer at the opening ceremony in Paris . The mysterious acrobat was seen jumping their way through the streets of Paris and around the iconic monuments in the French capital during the Olympic opening ceremony in July. Simon Nogueira, a French free-running champion, revealed after the event that he was one of nine people behind the mask .
Ruel has now come forward as the only woman who was asked to portray the Olympic torchbearer and admits she is ‘frustrated’ that the public were led to believe that it was a man. ‘Even if this character was supposed to remain masked, the fact that everyone thinks that there is only a man or only men underneath, frustrated me a lot..
. and I wanted to prove them wrong,’ Ruel told Le Parisien. ‘A month and a half before the ceremony, Vincent Zenzel [the choreographer] contacted us, me and eight other guys, a month and a half before the ceremony, in very secret, very confidential conditions.
‘We knew very little about what we were going to do. We learned in July that we would have two or three days of rehearsal, to be ready on July 26.’ Ruel also revealed that she found it difficult to perform he acrobatics whilst holding the Olympic torch, which was 70cm tall and weighed 1.
5kg. ‘The atmosphere was just crazy. There was a lot of love and adrenaline, you felt like something big was happening,’ said Ruel.
‘I did tw.