1952 Winter Olympics torch relay the symbolic fire lit in Olympia. The nine inch long torch was designed to cope with any weather condition that the relay team would face. Its cylindrical handle was topped off by a large, oval collar that depicted the Olympic rings, the year, and an arrow pointing from the start and end points of the relay (Morgedal and Oslo). A total of 94 renowned skiers or their descendants participated in the relay, the names of whom remained secret until they began their leg of the journey. The relay began on 13 February at the Morgedal home of Sondre Norheim, a
Carl Diem for an Olympic conference in 1934, Diem and Lewald imagined a new symbolic pageant that would cloak the German games with the ancient Greek mantle: the transit of a lit Olympic flame from Greece to Berlin by a relay of torch-bearing runners. While the relay is sometimes believed to be an ancient tradition, it was in fact the wholly modern creation of Lewald and Diem; the ancient games included a ritual flame commemorating the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, but not a torch relay. Diem had been organizing long distance road relays ever since 1910. On June