Faith & Meaning
The Sacred Flame: From Prometheus to 2028
How a Greek myth about stolen fire became the Olympic torch
January 3, 20254 min read
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People stop and watch when the Olympic torch goes by. The fire it carries comes with the oldest story the Greeks told about fire.
Prometheus
Long before the first Olympic Games, the Greeks explained where fire came from with Prometheus, a Titan who defied the gods to bring it to humans.
Zeus had forbidden it. Fire belonged to the gods. Prometheus saw people shivering in the dark, eating raw meat and dying young, so he stole fire from Olympus and carried it to Earth hidden in a hollow fennel stalk.
His punishment was to be chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver every day. The liver grew back each night and the eagle came back the next morning. In the myth he never recants.
"I caused mortals to cease foreseeing their doom... I caused blind hopes to dwell within their breasts."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Every Olympic torch carries a version of that story: light taken from the gods and handed to ordinary people.
The Fire at Olympia
Fire was part of the ancient Games. A sacred flame kindled from the sun burned on the altars at Olympia throughout the festival.
The modern lighting ceremony keeps that custom. Months before each Games, at the ruins of the Temple of Hera, an actress robed as a high priestess kindles the flame with a parabolic mirror and concentrated sunlight. No match ever touches it.
The relay is younger than most people think. It was invented for the 1936 Berlin Games by the organizer Carl Diem, as a link between ancient Olympia and the modern host city. More than 3,000 runners carried the first flame across seven countries, from Greece to Germany. The regime that staged those Games meant it as propaganda, and history has said so. The world kept the relay anyway, and dropped the rest.
Fire That Crosses Borders
Since then, the flame has gone nearly everywhere people can carry fire:
- 1964 Tokyo: The final torchbearer was Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb fell. Nineteen years later he climbed the stadium steps and lit the cauldron.
- 2000 Sydney: A torch engineered to burn underwater was carried by a diver across the Great Barrier Reef.
- 2008 Beijing: Climbers brought the flame to the summit of Mount Everest.
- 2013: Ahead of the Sochi Games, an unlit torch rode to the International Space Station and was carried outside on a spacewalk. Even the relay's planners respect vacuum.
- 2016 Rio: The flame wound through more than 300 Brazilian cities on its way to the Maracana.
Each relay tells its host's story, and the cauldron lightings become national memories. Anyone who watched Muhammad Ali lift the torch in Atlanta with trembling hands remembers it.
Why Fire Still Matters
We have electric light and central heating. Nobody needs a flame to get through the night, and people still watch one more closely than they watch a lamp.
A flame moves and needs tending. That is why people light candles at dinner and gather at fireplaces, and why a single torch can quiet a crowd.
The Olympic flame carries the whole history with it: Prometheus, the altars of Olympia, the priestess and her mirror, and the runners and lantern-keepers who guard one small fire across continents. A torchbearer running down a street is carrying roughly 3,000 years of that history.
2028
In 2028 the flame comes to America. For the first time it will cross all 50 states, carried by thousands of torchbearers on its way to Los Angeles.
I want to be one of them. Carrying it would not make me special. I want Santa Monica to see that fire come up its own street. If you'd back me, nominate me to carry it.