The flame game

STET

You have to love those Greek women dressed up as ancient priestesses in cool sleeveless whites, standing amid the hallowed ruins of Olympia and pretending to be all solemn and ancient priestessy, even as you know that a large contingent of battered press photographers and television crews are poking gleaming state-of-the-art media technology in their faces.

You have to also, quite genuinely, love the Olympic flame itself, which is kindled by the rays of the sun focused in a convex mirror, and passed, hand to hand, by hundreds of people one has never heard of, according to an itinerary that must be a nightmare to come up with and keep to.

The torch lives in hotel rooms every night under the watch of three guards, at least one of whom has to keep his eyelids propped up with toothpicks all night to make sure it doesn't go out.

Just in case it does, however, the Flame is attended, on its epic journey, by little Flamelets that share the same flame DNA from back in Greece, and that travel with it in lanterns as backup, because running all the way back to Olympia to relight the thing is too much even for the sporty people who make up those races in which you have to run seven thousand kilometres and then leap over a moat of broken glass before swimming up a cataract with cement blocks stapled to your ankles while snipers take potshots at you from on high.

To carry a torch or not to carry a torch, that is the question. If you carry it, you're a rotten lackey of the beastly Chinese regime. If you don't, you're a rotten spoilsport who can't keep politics out of a great celebration of humanity.

Well, it's all very murky to me. I mean, everyone is rushing to China to conduct business, and many of the people who think it's a bad idea to suppress Tibet wouldn't dream of boycotting business in China. Not to mention that the governments making shows of solidarity with the Dalai Lama aren't known for their fine human rights record at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay or Kashmir.

And let's not forget that the person who came up with the whole torch relay thing in the first place was that weedy, strangely-moustached, one-balled barrel of laughs called Adolf Hitler, so maybe nobody should be carrying the torch anywhere, ever.

The IOC, faced with the prospect of disruption and embarrassment over the length of the most ambitious international relay ever "" they'd planned on taking it to Everest this year "" are now more realistically thinking about going back to the simpler solution of just flying the flame to the host country and having a domestic relay.

But then, we'd be deprived of another set of interesting factoids like the ones that have been thrown our way for weeks; before they had to put it out three times in Paris this year, the Olympic torch has only ever gone out twice; it has been carried on a camel and on Concorde, underwater past the Great Barrier Reef, and been transmitted via satellite.

Personally, I won't be impressed until they burrow successfully through an Antarctic ice shelf without getting eaten by leopard seals, but still, the torch has logged a pretty impressive roster of places it's been and things it's done. Who could ever forget watching Antonio Rebollo light the cauldron at the 1992 Barcelona games by firing a blazing arrow into it?

The truly impressive thing about this year's torch relay is that so many people around the world have managed to get their act together and coordinate a global protest. Now if only they'd all get together and force action on carbon emissions.

(mitali.saran@gmail.com)