2018 Winter Olympics torch relay 2018 Winter Olympics torch relay The 2018 Winter Olympics torch relay was ran from October 24, 2017 until February 9, 2018, in advance of the 2018 Winter Olympics. After being lit in Olympia, Greece, the torch traveled to Athens on 31 October. The torch began its Korean journey on 1 November, visiting all Regions of Korea. The Korean leg began in Incheon: the torch travelled across the country for 101 days. 7,500 relay runners participated in the torch relay over a distance of 2,018 km. The torchbearers each carried the flame for 200 metres. The relay ended in Pyeongchang's 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