Former world champion Jake Wightman feels relieved to have been thrown a “lifeline” after he was named in the Team GB athletics squad for the Paris Olympics.

The British team of over 60 athletes is stacked with medal hopefuls including Dina Asher-Smith, who won 100m gold at last month’s European Championships, reigning 1500m world champion Josh Kerr, world indoor pole vault title-holder Molly Caudery and current world heptathlon champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson, selected for her fourth Olympics.

A maximum of three athletes could be selected in each individual event, with the top two finishers at last weekend’s British Championships – which also served as the Olympic trials – claiming places provided they met selection standards.

At Paris 2024, the Olympic marathon will take place on August 10 for men and the following day for women.

For many years it has been the reverse, but France organisers have opted for the women’s race to close out the Games for a poignant reason and with a poignant route: following that taken for the Women’s March on Versailles, on 5 and 6 October 1789.

“The marathon is a symbolic event of the Games and we wanted to follow a route that has meaning. We were inspired by the Women’s March on Versailles,” explained Aurélie Merle, executive director of sports competitions for Paris 2024.

“This seminal revolutionary female-led event is intrinsically tied to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games values, like putting women in the spotlight – among other things.”

For years, women were denied entry to the Olympics at all and later for many individual events or from different nations; the Paris Games aims to put women front and centre with this grand finale ahead of the closing ceremony.

Podium finishers at the upcoming Paris Olympics will be rewarded with a piece of the Eiffel Tower, organisers said on Thursday, unveiling the event’s medals which are set with hexagon-shaped tokens forged out of scrap metal from the monument.

The idea was to link the Games with symbols of France, said Thierry Reboul, creative director of Paris 2024.

“The absolute symbol of Paris and France is the Eiffel Tower,” said Reboul. “It’s the opportunity for the athletes to bring back a piece of Paris with them.”

Designed by jeweller Chaumet, the 18-gram hexagon tokens, representing the shape of France, are made of iron from past refurbishments of the Tower stored for years in a warehouse whose location is secret.

The story, reported by the New York Times and German news organization ARD, surrounds 23 Chinese swimmers, 11 of whom will compete at the Paris Olympics, testing positive for the heart medication trimetazidine (TMZ) during a training camp seven months out from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Zhang Yufei, a gold medalist in the women’s 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter freestyle relay, and Wang Shun, who won gold in the men’s 200-meter individual medley, are among those ready to compete in Paris, reports NBC. Crucially, the results only came to light this year, with the China Anti-Doping Agency (Chinada) claiming that the swimmers unintentionally ingested the substance because of contamination.

There have been accusations that some national associations have performed cover-ups countered with “fake news” replies by China. While there is anger after the doping agency cleared the Chinese swimmers but banned Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, who also claimed contamination with TMZ before competing at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

The 2024 Olympics in Paris officially begins with the opening ceremony on Friday 26 July, setting off a two-and-a-half-week festival of sport which comes to an end on Sunday 11 August.

Three years on from the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, Paris 2024 will see a new sport, breakdancing (or breaking), added to the mix. Other modern additions like 3×3 basketball, BMX, surfing, skateboarding and climbing all retain their spots in the schedule, but karate and baseball have been dropped.

Then there are the traditional big draws to watch out for, like swimming (Sat 27 July to Sun 4 Aug), artistic gymastics (Sat 27 Jul to Mon 5 Aug), athletics (Thu 1 to Sun 11 Aug) and track cycling (Mon 5 Aug to Sat 10 Aug). With an extra day of swimming on the schedule, it means the middle Olympic weekend will feature swimming, gymnastics and athletics across both days for the first time.

In total there are 32 sports, with some further broken down into separate disciplines making 48 in total. All together there will be 329 events – and therefore 329 gold medals to fight for.

Here is a closer look at the full day-by-day schedule for the Games, including every session for every sport:

When it gets to this point, we usually have to turn the clock back four years to take a glimpse in the rearview mirror at what came beforehand and the last Olympic Games. Not so this year: Tokyo was delayed and Covid-ringfenced and only three years back, a strange event for those present and yet one Team GB fared pretty well at.

They finished fourth in the medal table, 22 golds putting them ahead of ROC (remember ROC?!) and a haul of 64 medals in total – 20 silvers, 22 bronzes) meaning they won more overall than Japan, who finished third in the table with 27 golds.

Eight nations won a single bronze, six won just one silver and nothing else, while three nations in Bermuda, Morocco and Puerto Rico took home precisely one gold.

Lots and lots of flowers, medals…and face masks.

After three Olympic boxing qualifiers during a year of pain, a dozen broken hearts, bad decisions, tears, sweat and blood, the first bell for the British boxers at Paris 2024 is finally close.

Six members of the Team GB squad will be in Friday’s draw for the preliminary bouts in the thirteen weights that are spread across fourteen days of boxing. No other Olympic sport competes over the same number of days.

It is a mixed squad, a small squad compared to those from the last three Olympic boxing tournaments; the cycle has only been three years and since winning six medals in Tokyo in 2021, ten of the team of eleven have turned professional. There are other reasons that British boxers will only be competing in six of the thirteen weights in Paris, but too often the valid obstructions and distractions can sound like excuses; there are no excuses, it is hard to qualify for the Olympics.

Steve Bunce on GB’s medal hopes in the ring:

Thousands of tickets are still available for a number of marquee events at the Olympics with just days until the opening ceremony at Paris 2024.

Organisers have confirmed that between 500,000 and 600,000 tickets were still able to be purchased on Sunday afternoon, five days before the Games opens with a glitzy procession down the River Seine.

That included the sessions that feature the men’s and women’s 100 metres, athletics’ blue riband events, which would usually sell out well in advance of the start of the quadrennial spectacular.

Prices and details here if you’re considering a late charge to the capital of France for a headline event:

Good morning and welcome to the Independent’s coverage of the Olympic Games starting in Paris this week!

As ever, many of the world’s finest athletes will come together to compete for medals across a fortnight of thrilling action across multiple sporting disciplines on track, field and water events, individual and team competitions.

Team GB’s preparations are almost complete as they seek to build on a haul of 64 medals won in Tokyo three summers ago.

This time around the Games will look very different to that Covid-affected time, of course!