Paris Olympics 2024: What if athletes competed in space? Watch this NASA video, featuring Sunita Williams, to know

As the Paris Olympics 2024 kicked off on Friday with a huge pomp and show, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared an interesting video of astronauts “pretending to be athletes” in space. The nearly two-minute video featuring Indian-origin astronaut Sunita Williams showed astronauts practising their favourite sport inside the International Space Station (ISS).

The video, beginning with heroic background music, features several ISS astronauts holding an Olympic torch prop individually. Later, all of them can be seen doing warm-ups to practise separate sports inside the space station, like sprinting, weight lifting, aerobatics, etc.

At the end, one of the astronauts concluded the video by sharing the team's experience of practising as “athletes in space”. He also added that it is comparatively easier to perform weightlifting and other physical activities because of weightlessness. “We had the benefit of weightlessness. We can't imagine how hard this must be to be a world-class athlete under actual gravity. So from all of us aboard the International Space Station (ISS), to every single athlete in the Olympic games, God Speed,” said a NASA astronaut in the video.

Paris Olympics 2024

More than 6,000 athletes will participate in the Summer Olympics, which began on Friday in Paris. The opening ceremony was held in the city, and thousands of athletes sailed in the Seine River.

The spectacle started with a dreamy break from tradition as 'Parade of Nations' kicked off the proceedings in which athletes from 205 countries and one refugee team sailed down the Seine on boats despite heavy rain, in the run-up to and during the ceremony, threatening to play spoilsport. French President Emmanuel Macron declared the Games open, marking the formal beginning of competitions for the next 16 days. The highlight of the unconventional and daring opening ceremony was without doubt the athletes' march on the Seine river.