Word: torch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Your opinion of the Olympic-torch relay - which kicked off Oct. 22 with a traditional flame-lighting ceremony in Greece - is likely to reflect your opinion of the Olympics themselves. If international cooperation and glory keep you misty-eyed from the opening ceremony through the last television montage, then you'll love the heady symbolism of the torch relay, a "journey of harmony" in which a succession of runners transports a flame lit by the sun's rays from the Games' ancient birthplace to the host site - in 2010, that's Vancouver - over...
...other hand, if you think the competition has been buried under layers of scandal and crass commercialism, you may have never been a fan of the torch relay - and you might be incensed to learn that its roots lie in Nazi Germany. Carl Diem, the secretary-general of the 1936 Berlin Games, pitched the event as a way to infuse the Games with pageantry and buff the mythic image of the Third Reich. That year, on its way from Greece to Germany, the flame passed through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia - all of which...
...time to light the Olympic Torch in a tropical country," Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it gathered in Copenhagen to select a site for the 2016 Summer Olympics. "It is Brazil's time." The IOC agreed. On Oct. 2, Rio de Janeiro beat out First World metropolises Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago to become the first South American city to host the Games--sparking a deafening celebration on Copacabana Beach to rival the city's annual Carnaval bacchanal...
...Brazil's time," President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva insisted in his pitch before Friday's International Olympic Committee vote. "It is time to light the Olympic torch in a tropical country." The IOC agreed - and that lit up a frenzied carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a city that knows how to party perhaps better than any other. As the decision was announced, the world forgot Rio's problems for a moment, especially its frightening murder rate, and watched tens of thousands of its residents, known as Cariocas, exult on Copacabana Beach, dancing to deafening music in tanga...
...them from adversely affecting the Olympics. Barack Obama reminded the IOC that Chicago is the "city that works." But Chicago lost out in large part because Lula could argue that, in Brazil, Latin America finally has a country that works. As a result, it's time to light the torch down South American...