How Atlanta kept its final torchbearer secret, and what Ali did with the moment
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Late on the night of July 19, 1996, Janet Evans carried the Olympic torch up a long ramp inside Atlanta's Olympic Stadium. Evans was a swimmer with four gold medals, and most of the crowd assumed she was the finale.
Then a man in white stepped out of the shadows at the top of the ramp. Muhammad Ali, 54 years old, stood waiting with his arm outstretched.
He took the flame in his right hand. His left arm trembled at his side from the Parkinson's disease he had lived with for more than a decade. He made no attempt to hide it.
The identity of the final torchbearer was closely guarded, and Ali was not the original plan.
Billy Payne, the head of Atlanta's organizing committee, wanted Evander Holyfield: an Atlanta native, an Olympic medalist, a heavyweight champion of the world. A hometown pick, and a defensible one.
Dick Ebersol, the NBC Sports executive producing the broadcast, argued for Ali. To the watching world, no living athlete meant what Ali meant. He had won boxing gold in Rome in 1960 as an 18-year-old named Cassius Clay, then become the most recognized fighter, and one of the most recognized people, on earth. Ebersol made his case in late 1995, Payne came around, and the secret held until Evans reached the top of the ramp.
It took under a minute and felt much longer. Ali steadied the torch as his hands shook, then lowered it to a fuse that carried the flame up a wire toward the cauldron high above the stadium. For a few seconds the fire seemed to hesitate on its climb, and the crowd of tens of thousands went quiet.
The young Ali had been the fastest heavyweight anyone had seen. This Ali could barely keep the torch level. He lit the cauldron anyway, in front of the world, after years in which the public had watched him grow quiet.
His Olympic story had started 36 years earlier in Rome, where the teenage Cassius Clay charmed the athletes' village, won the light heavyweight gold, and reportedly wore the medal for days. That medal later vanished. Ali told different versions of how over the years, including the famous one that he threw it into the Ohio River after being refused service in a Louisville restaurant. Whatever the truth, the medal was gone.
During those same Atlanta Games, at halftime of a USA versus Yugoslavia basketball game, Ali was presented with a replacement gold medal for the one he had lost.
Before 1996, the final torchbearer was usually a beloved local athlete, a fitting and safe choice. Atlanta showed the lighting could say something. Four years later, Sydney handed its cauldron to Cathy Freeman, an Aboriginal sprinter carrying her country's unfinished history. Her story, and Enriqueta Basilio's before her, is part of the women who carried the Olympic flame.
For me, Atlanta settled what the torch measures, and it is courage more than speed or fame. Ali's trembling hand is one reason people care that the flame is never allowed to go out.
In 2028 the flame comes to my city, and thousands of ordinary people will carry it, through a relay that touches all 50 states and begins in Atlanta. Janet Evans, who handed Ali the flame that night, is now LA28's Chief Athlete Officer. Some of those runners will have tremors of their own, and after Atlanta nobody will question that they belong. If you know someone who should carry it, nominate them.