Olympic torch paraded in Cornwall by David Beckham

The applause inside the gold-painted Airbus 319 was not the usual ironical salute for a bumpy landing at the start of a package holiday. Eight years after Sebastian Coe and his team set out to win the Games for London, the Olympic flame had touched down in Britain. Now the Games can begin.

This was, London mayor Boris Johnson proclaimed, the first time a naked flame had been permitted on a British Airways flight since they banned smoking on planes. And there indeed it sat, lit a week earlier by the rays of the sun at ancient Olympia but now, in quadruplicate, occupying two seats in the front row of the passenger cabin of BA2012.

It flickered bravely in four specially made lanterns, each 15in high, during the four-hour trip from Athens' Eleftherios Venizelios airport ‚built for the 2004 Olympics, to the Royal Navy's airbase at Culdrose, near Penzance.

The arrival in Cornwall preceded the start of the 70-day, torch relay around Britain, which will end on July 27, when the flame is used to ignite the cauldron in London's Olympic Stadium.

Its in-flight attendants, alongside Johnson, included footballer David Beckham, Olympics organiser Lord Coe, the Olympics minister Hugh Robertson, Princess Anne, the president of the British Olympic Association, and a small posse of track-suited Metropolitan police officers.

On landing at Culdrose, where the flight was met by Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minster, the flame was transferred to a ceremonial cauldron from which a torch will be lit early on Saturday morning and placed in the hands of Ben Ainslie, the triple gold medal winning sailor, the first of 8,000 runners. The second is Anastasia Swallow, an 18-year-old surfer from St Ives.

"So many of the people who are running will be members of the communities through which they're carrying the torch," Coe said. "Our market research says that at least nine million people will be watching, and many of them will be seeing their local coach, or teacher, or policeman."

Or perhaps their local A-list celebrity. Beckham, a member of the 2012 team since its inception, made it clear that he would relish being a torch-bearer during the leg of the relay that passes through his native east London as well as being selected for Great Britain's Olympic football team.

"I've never performed at an Olympic Games," he said. "But to be part of this is something very special. We've got some very special people carrying the torch and it's going to be a proud moment for them. If I was to be one of those carrying in London, it would be very special for me."

Cynics like to point out that the torch relay was invented for "Hitler's Games" in 1936, but torch relays played a part in the Ancient Olympics, sent out through Greek towns and villages to advertise the Games. In the modern era, the Olympic flame was re-introduced in 1928 by the peace-loving people of Amsterdam, eight years before the Berlin organisers dreamed up the idea of reconnecting Aryan supremacists with their supposed ancestors.

No one had thought to turn a flame into an Olympic symbol when London first held the Games at White City in 1908. On the second occasion, 40 years later, the torch arrived at Wembley stadium by a circuitous route in order to avoid a threat of disturbances in northern Greece, still enduring the aftermath of its civil war.

Its overland journey through Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France was undertaken in a car provided by Rolls-Royce and specially geared to proceed at a stately 8mph. The destroyer HMS Bicester carried it from Calais to Dover, where it was welcomed by a crowd of 50,000. Then it promptly went out. Officially, it was relit from a spare carried from Greece. Unofficially, a cigarette lighter was hastily employed. Eventually it was carried into the stadium by John Mack, the 22-year-old president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, as fine a specimen of blond, strapping manhood that could be found.

This time the designated hero figure might be Johnson but is more likely to be Steve Redgrave, the owner of gold medals from five successive Games, or perhaps an east End child of symbolic mixed ethnicity. According to Coe, discussions on the identities of the final torch-bearers have yet to begin, but Beckham is unlikely to be disappointed, just as he will almost certainly be granted his wish of a place in the football squad.

He was mobbed by expats and Greek guests during a reception at the British ambassador's residence in Athens on Thursday night, but those suggesting that his selection for the team might be a ploy to use his celebrity to fill seats and sell shirts were being "a little bit disrespectful", the 37-year-old former England captain said. "Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson, Fabio Capello and Sven-Goran Eriksson, they don't pick you because they want to fill stadiums. I've always wanted to be picked for what I can bring to a team."

He had been amused, he said, to hear himself introduced as "Sir David Beckham" by the announcer during the handover ceremony in the Panathenaic Stadium on Thursday. "It made me laugh," he said. "It made everybody laugh, probably."

Looking ahead to the next 10 weeks, in which the flame will make its way around Britain, Coe was sanguine about the threat of the sort of disruption created by pro-Tibet demonstrators when the Beijing torch visited London in 2008. "We live in a country where peaceful protest is very much a part of what we are," he said before leaving Athens. "Thank goodness it is, in a way, as long as that doesn't slop over into becoming a public order issue or endangering people who are enjoying their day."

It had been instructive, he said, to watch the test event for the torch relay, which took place in Leicestershire last month. "It started at seven o'clock in the morning in Leicester and ended at five or six o'clock in the evening in Peterborough and went through little villages and small towns. In Melton Mowbray, they were four or five deep on the pavement, and that was just a test event with a cardboard torch and no actual flame. I don't sense that there's a widespread feeling that this is to be anything other than cherished. My gut instinct is that people will be quite protective."

Amid a Cornish sea-fret on Friday night, Beckham was invited to step forward and light the cauldron. It is unlikely to be his last involvement.








source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/

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