TRACKING THE TORCH

Commemorating the theft of fire from the Greek god Zeus by Prometheus, the origins of the tradition lie in ancient Olympics, when a fire was kept burning throughout the celebration of the Games. The fire was reintroduced at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, and it has been part of the modern Olympics since. The modern torch relay was introduced in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Olympic torch today is ignited several months before the opening celebration of the Games at the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia, Greece. Eleven women, representing priestesses, perform a ceremony in which the torch is kindled by the light of the sun, its rays concentrated by a parabolic mirror. The torch relay ends on the day of the opening ceremony in the central stadium of the Games — this year at 8 pm on 8.8.08, at Beijing — when the flame in a cauldron is lit. The final carrier is often kept secret until the last moment, and is usually a sports celebrity of the host country. The flame continues to burn for the duration of the Olympics.

Although the Torch is still carried by runners most of the time, it has been transported in many different ways. It travelled by boat in 1948 across the English Channel and it was first transported by aeroplane in 1952, when the fire travelled to Helsinki. In 1956, the equestrian events were held separately because of strict quarantine regulations in Australia. All carriers in the torch relay to Stockholm, where these events were held instead, travelled on horseback. In 1976, the flame was transformed into a radio signal. From Athens, this signal was carried by satellite to Canada, where it was received and used to trigger a laser beam to re-light the flame. In 2000, the torch was carried under water by divers near the Great Barrier Reef. In 2004, the first global torch relay was undertaken, a journey that lasted 78 days, covered more than 78,000 km, in the hands of some 11,300 torchbearers, travelling to Africa and South America for the first time, visiting all previous Olympic cities and finally returning to Athens for the 2004 Summer Olympics. This year, the torch relay started this week from Olympia, and will cover Central Asia, Europe, North and South America, South and South East Asia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Australia before the domestic leg in China starts. When the torch lands in Delhi on April 17, Aamir Khan, Kiran Bedi and the Coca-Cola CEO will be among the bearers of the torch. Coca-Cola is the worldwide partner for the Olympics. It is only twice in the history of modern Olympics that the flame has gone out from the time the torch was lit to when that year’s Games ended.

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