Eighty-two days across 33 states, in the first relay that let anyone carry the flame
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On the morning of May 8, 1984, the Olympic flame arrived at United Nations Plaza in New York City. The first kilometer belonged to two young Americans chosen for their names as much as their legs: Gina Hemphill, granddaughter of Jesse Owens, and Bill Thorpe Jr., grandson of Jim Thorpe.
They ran it together and pointed the flame west. Ahead of them lay 82 days and roughly 9,000 miles of American road.
The torch relay had been invented for the Berlin Games of 1936, a spectacle staged for a regime Jesse Owens then embarrassed with four gold medals on its own track. Forty-eight years later, his granddaughter was the first to hold the flame on American soil.
The 1984 Games were a private venture. After Montreal's crushing debts in 1976, Los Angeles had won the right to host largely because almost no one else wanted the bill, and organizers were determined to run the Games without public money. So the relay needed sponsors too. It became the first torch relay funded primarily by corporate sponsorship, with AT&T as its backbone.
Greece was furious. That February, the Greek minister of sports announced the government would not allow the sacred flame to be used for commercial purposes, and Greek officials threatened to withhold the lighting at Olympia until just days before the relay began. The standoff eventually broke and the flame crossed the Atlantic. The Olympic movement has settled a lot of disputes the same way since.
Through the Youth Legacy Kilometer program, any person or group that donated 3,000 dollars to selected youth charities earned the right to carry the Olympic flame for one kilometer.
For the first time in Olympic history, the torch was not reserved for athletes, dignitaries and celebrities. A church group could pool money to send its pastor down the road with the flame. A town could send its retired schoolteacher. Families ran kilometers in memory of people they had lost.
The program raised nearly 11 million dollars for the YMCA, the Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs of America, and Special Olympics. In stretches where no one had sponsored a kilometer, the flame was carried by cadre runners from the Telephone Pioneers of America, an organization of current and retired AT&T employees who trained for months to cover the gaps.
The route crossed 33 states and the District of Columbia. People lined roads in the rain and waited at midnight highway junctions for a single runner with a flame. Local newspapers printed relay timetables the way they printed weather.
It ended on July 28, 1984, when Gina Hemphill, who had run the relay's first kilometer in New York, carried the torch into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and handed it to Rafer Johnson, who climbed the stadium steps and became the first Black athlete ever to light an Olympic cauldron.
Every relay since has followed the 1984 pattern: the teacher carrying the flame through her hometown, the nurse, the veteran, the kid in a racing wheelchair.
In 2028 the flame comes back to Los Angeles on a relay through all 50 states. New York was a popular guess for the start, as a nod to Hemphill and Thorpe, but LA28 picked Atlanta. I am campaigning for one of those kilometers myself. If you'd back me, add your name here.