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The 2010 torch, designed by Leo Obstbaum, is meant to evoke the Canadian landscape and its vast, snowy potential. The Olympic cauldron at the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games, which holds the record for longest domestic torch relay—but only until the Vancouver cauldron is lit. The Olympic flame at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Canadian Olympic rowers passed the flame on October 30 in Saanich, just two of 12,000 torchbearers who will eventually cover a total of 27,961 miles—the longest torch relay within a single country in Olympic history. Forging links: Toby Fender touches his mother's hand as carries the torch on October 31 in Colwood, British Columbia. |
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"No spectacle is nobler than the blaze."
—Samuel Johnson
From the time humanity first put flint to stone, fire has provided light, warmth and sustenance. Fittingly, a flame serves as the bridge between the ancient Olympic games—where fires were lit at the temples of Zeus and his wife, Hera—and the modern games, traveling every two years from its ancestral home in Athens to a new host city. If it is any comfort to the athletes who sweat and sacrifice to get to the games, the torch has it no easier. Although an airplane could deliver the Olympic flame from Athens to Vancouver, site of the 2010 winter games, in half a day, the flame will instead be chaperoned by hand on a 108-day, 27,961-mile odyssey that will ricochet around Canada's vastness like a hockey puck. For the 12,000 torchbearers battling the cold, the flame's warmth will be more than symbolic.
It's a far cry from the first torch relay. In 1934 a pair of German sports ministers visiting Athens for an Olympic conference concocted the idea of a torch relay, in part to bestow a mantle of pomp and history on the summer games that were slated for Nazi Berlin two years later. What started as a relatively straightforward exercise carried out by 3,742 young men, each taking the flame for about five minutes on a direct route from Athens to Berlin, has grown into a cultural phenomenon.
Canada, a three-time host to the Olympics, revels in the torch ritual more than most countries. The 1976 games took on a Buck Rogers twist, as a radio signal transmitted the flame via satellite from Athens to Montreal, where it was reignited using a laser beam. The Calgary '88 winter games featured the longest domestic torch relay at that time—a record that was broken by Salt Lake City in 2002, but that will be reclaimed by Canada by the time the cauldron is lit at the 2010 opening ceremony.
Unlike recent journeys to Beijing and Athens that circled the globe, this time the relay will be contained within Canada's borders, although it will be roughly the same distance. Fittingly, the torch's designers incorporated Canada's open landscape and the smooth, fluid lines left in the snow and ice from winter sports into the slender, aerodynamic design meant to convey the land's vast potential. As the late Leo Obstbaum, who directed the design of the torch (which was manufactured by Canadian engineering firm Bombardier), explained, “When they hold it in their hands, I want them to be proud.”
Along its path, the Olympic flame will visit the Igloo Church, in the Northwest Territories, and the world's northernmost inhabited community, Alert, in the Nunavut Territory. The torch will travel high and low—over the Kootenay Pass, at 5,807 feet above sea level, and on the sea itself, aboard a ferry in British Columbia. The Canadians will employ more than a hundred modes of transportation in their relay, including kayaks, tractors, snowmobiles, and cross-country skis.
Despite the forbidding terrain and sometimes harsh conditions, interest in carrying the torch is high. Indeed, enthusiasm was so strong that Canada became the first country ever to allow groups of people to take a leg of the relay, so that more people could share in the experience. Applicants were asked to write a paragraph explaining why they were deserving of the honor, but a random selection process was used to ensure a diverse cross-section of the population is included. Teachers and farmers, miners and doctors, students and the retired will all take their turn as runners.
The flame also drew in former Olympians such as Linda Schaumleffel, who rowed for Canada in the Montreal games. Thirty-three years later, she is looking forward to carrying the torch again nearly as much. “I was ecstatic when I received the letter informing me that I was chosen,” Schaumleffel told RL. Big-name athletes such as the NBA's Steve Nash, professional golfer Stephen Ames, and NHL superstar Sidney Crosby will also help carry the flame to Vancouver. Crosby, who will also represent Canada on the Olympic ice hockey team, plans to carry the torch in his native Nova Scotia during a day off from his regular season.
Although each bearer's time with the flame is limited to a kilometer or less (300 meters in urban areas), it can be rough going. Protesters looking for a global stage often seek to disrupt the relay, as they did near Trento, Italy, in 2006, when the torch was briefly stolen from a bearer on the way to the winter games in Torino. (Runners should be able to move more swiftly this year, thanks to a design that has shed half the weight of that hulking five-pound one.)
The flame has also been extinguished occasionally: Two years ago Parisian officials were forced to put out the flame and transport the torch by car after protesters against China's treatment of Tibet wreaked havoc on the course. On the occasions when the torch does go out, it is relit from a backup flame, also lit in Athens, that is kept close at hand. This year's torch features a two-flame design that should keep it lit in even the harshest winter weather, with temperatures hitting -22 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once we realize the actual flame can—and from time to time does—expire, keeping the fire alive is an essentially futile goal. The relay itself then increases in importance. The torch is a symbolic mantle, passed not only from runner to runner but from country to country and generation to generation. The day after giving birth in the winter of 1988, Debra Roy left the hospital to run the Olympic torch down a frigid highway in Ontario. This year she will watch the son born twenty-one years ago, Neil Harbun, take her place on the trail to Vancouver. They are but one more link in a line of torches passed.
Richard Dewey is a freelance writer based in New York. He has previously covered baseball in Cuba, snow polo in St. Moritz, and sailing in St. Barth's for RL Magazine. He was the 2009 Marjorie Deane writer for the finance and economics section of The Economist.
Photography credits:
- NATHALIE ALONSO/AFP/Getty Images
- Getty Images
- Ingolfe Pompe
- Diana Nethercott-Beatty/Getty Images
- Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images
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