Since the very first Olympic games were held, the torch relay has been an important part of the pre-games ceremonies. Today, the torch goes to some pretty amazing places including the North Pole, outer space, and now, into the deepest lake in the world.
Taking the Olympic Flame into Lake Baikal
A stunning rift lake located in southern region of Siberia, Lake Baikal is the world’s most voluminous freshwater lake, containing approximately twenty percent of the planet’s unfrozen surface fresh water; at 1,642 meters, it is also the world’s deepest known lake. With exceptionally clear water and a surface area of 31,722 square kilometers, this incredible lake is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as the site of a stunning underwater Olympic torch ceremony that took place at a depth of thirteen meters.
Before the underwater relay took place on day 47 of the 2014 torch relay, a group of nine Olympic torchbearers were greeted by traditional Russian Cossack dancers and other performers as they carried the flame through Taltsy to the town pier. There, the torch was ceremoniously transferred to a waiting boat that took the team and the Olympic flame along the Angara River to Lake Baikal, where biologist and television personality Ivan Zatevakhin passed the torch off to diver Nicholay Rybachenko, who is part of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations’ Baikal search and rescue team.
A special burner with a pyrotechnic charge which is similar to a flare allowed the flame to remain lit underwater as it was transferred to Aleksandr Vronsky, senior vice president of the Sochi 2014 Olympics Organizing Committee. Vronsky then ascended to the surface of the lake and passed the torch to Mikhail Chuev, who used a jetpack to rocket himself and the flame over the surface of the lake at a height of 10 meters, eventually landing on the lakeshore.
The torch was then passed to rhythmic gymnast Daria Dmitrieva, who took the all-around silver at the London 2012 Olympics, where it continued its journey toward Sochi, where the winter games are being held.
This incredible underwater ceremony was the first time the 2014 Olympic flame has made its way underwater, but it’s not likely to be the last. The practice of taking the flame underwater began during the buildup to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, when divers took the torch on a three-minute tour around Agincourt Reef, which is a popular section of the Great Barrier Reef. Like the Sochi flame, the original design burned at 2,000 degrees Celsius but looked very much like the normal flame. It took a team of chemists and pyrotechnics experts a total of nine months to develop the special flare, which is much brighter than a normal flare and which is composed of a special mixture of oxygen-generating chemicals, finely powdered magnesium, and other elements that create enough pressure and heat to prevent water from entering the metal tube that contains it.