2002 Winter Olympics torch relay 2002 Winter Olympics torch relay The 2002 Winter Olympics torch relay was a 65-day run, from December 4, 2001 until February 8, 2002, prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics. The runners carried the Olympic Flame throughout the United States - following its lighting in Olympia, Greece to the opening ceremony of the 2002 games at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 2002 torch relay was also the 50th anniversary of the Winter Olympic torch relay, which was first run during the 1952 Winter Olympics. As with all the Olympic Torch Relays the goal is to share the Olympic
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