2010 Winter Olympics torch relay 22 October 2009 the Olympic Torch was lit during a ceremony held at the Ancient Olympia in Greece. Actress Maria Nafpliotou played the role of the High Priestess and ignited the flame using a parabolic mirror and the sun's ray. The first torch was carried by Olympic skier Vassilis Dimitriadis. Kept under close secrecy, the final Olympic Torchbearer turned out to be not one, but five final torchbearers. Rick Hansen brought it into BC Place Stadium, in turn lighting Catriona Le May Doan's torch, who lit Steve Nash's torch, and the flame continued to Nancy Greene and Wayne Gretzky. Three
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