2010 Summer Youth Olympics torch relay domestic leg. A specially chartered Gulfstream G550 (tail no. HB-JEV) was chartered to bring the flame on its journey around the world. The G550 was painted with a special livery for this purpose. For the domestic leg, members of the public were invited to sign up to be one of the 2400 torchbearers. A large number of torchbearers were youths, with the youngest being just 11 years old and the oldest, an ex-Olympian, being 82 years of age. In Olympic tradition, the flame was lit at the ancient site of the first Olympic Games in Olympia, Greece. The ceremony was
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