Word: flamingly
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...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...
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...
Keeping the flame lighted after it arrives on U.S. soil may be tricky. On practice runs in March, the flame kept going out. The maker of the torch has switched to a higher-grade propane, but as a precaution, a second Olympic flame will be kept burning in a lantern along the route...
...celebrities from Jane Fonda to O.J. Simpson. The runners will be, if anything, even more varied. Leading off the relay from the U.N. will be the grandchildren of the great Olympians Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens. But in Ventura, Calif., Hell's Angel George Christie will carry the flame, decked out in a regulation Olympic running outfit embellished with touches like a silver skull earring and lurid tattoos. The L.A.O.O.C. cashed his $3,000 sponsorship check, unaware of his club allegiance. Says Christie: "Their uniform will never look so cool...