ANCIENT OLYMPIA: The Olympic flame for the inaugural Youth Games in Singapore has been successfully lit by the sun’s rays at the birthplace of the ancient Olympics.

Standing in front of the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera, actress Ino Menegaki, dressed as an ancient high priestess, used a concave mirror to focus the sun’s rays on a silver torch.

The high priest, along with several other priests, proceeded to the stadium where the ancient Olympics were held from 776 B.C. to 393 A.D. and, after a short ceremony based on ancient Greek rites, lit the torch of the first runner, Apostolos Koutavas, 16, also handing him a small olive branch.

Koutavas, a 2010 junior European trampoline gold medallist who will compete in the Youth Olympics, ran a short distance inside the stadium before handing the torch to another runner. The torch was eventually given to Ser Miang Ng, the chairman of the Youth Olympics organising committee.

The flame will not be carried in a relay, as in the Summer and Winter Olympics, but will visit five cities, one on each continent – Berlin; Dakar, Senegal; Mexico City; Auckland, New Zealand and Seoul – before arriving in Singapore for the Aug 14-26 games.

“We are here...to mark a new beginning for the Olympic Movement,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said at the ceremony. “By combining sport, education and culture in a global forum, the Youth Olympic Games will ... serve as a gateway to a wider world that will improve the world’s best young athletes’ performance on the field of play and in the more important field of life.

“Combining sport, culture and education is a Greek idea,” Rogge stated before the ceremony. “We must take care that young athletes are not overloaded, so we have not been very stringent with qualification standards.”

A total of 3,500 athletes from 205 countries, aged 14-18, will take part at the Youth Olympics. All 26 sports from the Summer Games will be represented, but not all events within each sport. Some sports will be staged in a different format. Basketball, for example, will be a 3-on-3, half-court game played over three five-minute periods.

The IOC decided to stage the Youth Olympics in 2007, motivated, in part, by the desire to interest more young people in participating in sports instead of sedentary activities such as surfing the Internet. The Internet, though, is playing a major part in the IOC’s strategy to sell the games.

“Our youth ambassadors are speaking to the youth over short videos shown on YouTube,” said IOC Executive Director Gilbert Felli, while Rogge added that “the Youth Olympics Facebook page has 3.5 million friends.”Sergei Bubka, the pole vault world-record holder who also heads the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Youth Olympics, said they were a “great idea” which he would have liked to have had in his time as a young athlete in the late 1970s.

“This is a great way for the young athletes to learn the power of the Olympic values,” Bubka stated.

Innsbruck, Austria, will stage the first edition of the Winter Youth Olympics in 2012. The next Summer Youth Games will be held in Nanjing, China, in 2014.—AP
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