Word: flame
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fire is a five-alarmer, one of the most spectacular in San Francisco since World War II. Two giant wooden piers on the city's downtown waterfront are burning out of control, hurling giant orange flames against a nighttime Pacific sky. As scores of fire fighters scramble to uncoil hose lines and position aerial platforms, a slight figure tightly wrapped in a flame-resistant fire fighter's coat steps carefully through the debris in open-toed shoes. Above the roar of high-pressure pumps, she quizzes battalion commanders and cranes her neck to assess the fire fighters...
...Olympic flame, kindled at the ruins of Olympia in Greece, arrived in New York City twelve hours later aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. It was a dispiriting day for pageantry: raw, windy, drizzly. But as runners started the torch on its zigzag, 15,000-kilometer journey across 33 of the 50 American states, the dark skies seemed only to intensify the symbolic glow. The second runner, 91-year-old Abel Kiviat, silver medalist in the 1,500-meter race in the 1912 Olympics, had no inkling that anything was amiss as he ended his appointed kilometer...
Competing games, of course, would further dim the symbolic flame of the official Olympics. That flame already is flickering low in the political winds that have been gusting for at least the past dozen years. The Los Angeles Games will be the fifth in a row marred by politics. The unhappy sequence began with riots outside and a black-power salute by U.S. athletes inside the 1968 Games in Mexico City and the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Games in Munich. It continued in 1976 with the boycott at the Olympiad in Montreal by black...
...been running lurid depictions of Los Angeles as a sinkhole of smog, drugs and pornography, and has even been warning that Soviet Olympic athletes might be kidnaped there. The announcement of the actual pullout from the Games was carefully timed to coincide less with the arrival of the Olympic flame in New York than with the Soviet national holiday celebrating victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. And then it was heavily downplayed?a short story on the back page of Pravda, a brief mention close to the end of the main nightly newscast?in the apparent hope that...
Bringing the flame to Zurich and Geneva makes more than just political sense. The economic burden of the Games can be tremendous, Host city Montreal, for example, lost a bundle in 1976 and almost did not complete construction of its stadium in time for the opening ceremonies. Although local business thrives during an Olympiad, the host's tax coffers are rapidly depleted. If the site of the Games were made permanent, the initial expenditure would be offset by a lack of building requirements for all subsequent Olympiads. The initial construction costs themselves might be spread out, and assumed...