Roncin added that he and his team regarded creating a new design as a "test" in terms of representing the French hosting of the next Summer Olympics and Paralympics, which will start on July 26, 2024.

"We necessarily worked on this idea of Pictos sport because it is a test that is still very important in the Olympic Games and in the graphic programme of the Olympic Games," Roncin said.

"It has always been a kind of playground for each edition, to reinvent the sports pictograms in the colours of each edition.

"Since 1964, approximately, there has been this creation of pictograms.

"It became a little official at that time with Tokyo and we find traces of other design around sport, that is to say sports illustration, from 1924.

"And so we wanted to break a little this literal pictograph representation thing."

Julie Matikhine, Paris 2024 branding manager, emphasised the influence and importance of getting branding right from a historic point of view.

"The look of the Games is the graphic and visual envelope in which the Olympic and Paralympic Games take place," she said.

"Each edition of the Games has its own identity.

"Generally, it transmits or embodies the values of the host country.

"It's very powerful, the look of the Games, because it's still the image that is associated with each sporting performance, with each highlight of the Olympic Games or the Paralympic Games.

"We see this look behind all the performances on TV, behind all the images that journalists and then social networks will produce.

"It is part of the immaterial trace that the Olympic and Paralympic Games will leave behind.”

Read more about Olympic graphics from Tokyo 1964 through to the present day in this week's Big Read