1988 Winter Olympics torch relay 1988 Winter Olympics torch relay The 1988 Olympic torch relay began on November 15, 1987, when the torch was lit at Olympia and Greek runner Stellos Bisbas began what was called "the longest torch run in history". The flame arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean two days later and over 88 days, traveled west across Canada. It passed through most major cities, north to the Arctic Ocean at Inuvik, Northwest Territories, then west to the Pacific Ocean at Victoria, British Columbia before returning east to Alberta, and finally Calgary. The torch covered a distance of , the
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