The parade opens with cadets from the military schools in order of seniority: the École Polytechnique, the Saint-Cyr and the École Navale, followed by newer academies. Competition between those schools often led to some practical pranks: Polytechnique is a highly selective engineer school (considered as the most difficult in the country) whose students reverse most of the time to civilian occupation while Saint Cyr is a professional officer school. As a consequence students from the first have occasionally "mined" the path for their colleagues using sticky or slippery products.