By ELENA BECATOROS, Related Press
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The Olympic flame for the Milan Cortina Winter Video games was formally handed to Italian organizers on Thursday within the all-marble stadium in central Athens the place the primary fashionable Olympics have been held almost 130 years in the past.
Olympic Gold Medalist rower Stefanos Ntouskos lights a cauldron with the Olympic flame in entrance of the traditional Parthenon temple atop of Acropolis hill in the course of the Olympic torch relay for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Athens, Greece, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photograph/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Greece, Olympic and Italy flags, from left, wave in the course of the Olympic flame handover ceremony for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics at Panathenaic stadium, in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photograph/Petros Giannakouris)
Greek Ladies’s Nationwide Water polo participant Elena Xenaki, left, lights the cauldron in the course of the Olympic flame handover ceremony for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics at Panathenaic stadium, in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photograph/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Italian Olympic medalists tennis participant Jasmine Paolini, proper, lights a torch from World Wrestling Champion Giorgos Kougioumtsidis, left, in the course of the Olympic flame handover ceremony for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics at Panathenaic stadium, in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025.(AP Photograph/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Greek Ladies’s Nationwide Water polo participant Elena Xenaki lights the cauldron in the course of the Olympic flame handover ceremony for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics at Panathenaic stadium, in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photograph/Thanassis Stavrakis)
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Olympic Gold Medalist rower Stefanos Ntouskos lights a cauldron with the Olympic flame in entrance of the traditional Parthenon temple atop of Acropolis hill in the course of the Olympic torch relay for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Athens, Greece, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photograph/Thanassis Stavrakis)
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From Athens the flame will journey to Italy, the place it is going to start a 63-day, 12,000-kilometer relay by way of all 110 Italian provinces earlier than reaching Milan’s San Siro Stadium for the opening ceremony on Feb. 6.
Italy will host the flame for the primary time in 20 years and 10,000 torchbearers have been organized.
“To stand here in this historic stadium provides an inspiring reminder of the honor we have been granted and the precious treasure we will carry home with us,” Milan Cortina organizing committee president Giovanni Malago stated earlier than receiving the flame.
A forecast of extreme rainstorms in Athens stored giant crowds away and led organizers to announce the ceremony could be shortened. However the rain held off till the very finish, a weak solar filtering by way of the heavy black clouds, and the few hardy spectators who turned up have been capable of take pleasure in a efficiency that includes Greek and Italian singers and a youngsters’s choir within the stadium which staged the primary fashionable Video games in 1896.
After spending the evening burning in a cauldron exterior the fifth century B.C. Parthenon temple atop the Acropolis, Greece’s most well-known landmark, the flame was carried into the Panathenaic stadium by Greek water polo participant Elena Xenaki, who lit one other cauldron within the stadium together with Greece’s ladies’s nationwide water polo group.
The flame was lit on Nov. 26 in Historic Olympia, the location of the traditional video games which impressed the trendy Olympic motion, utilizing a concave mirror to focus the solar’s rays on a torch in a extremely ceremonial efficiency. The concept of the Olympic flame and torch relay was the results of Greek-German cooperation and commenced forward of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. The custom has been adopted ever since.
On Thursday, Greece’s Olympic Committee president Isidoros Kouvelos handed the flame to Malago.
“We cannot change the whole world in 16 days of competition,” Kouvelos stated, “but we can show for 16 days what the world could look like when respect comes first.”
These are the third Winter Video games hosted by Italy however preparations have been tormented by price overruns and development setbacks.
The Video games function 116 medal occasions, the debut of ski mountaineering, the return of NHL gamers to Olympic ice hockey and better feminine participation.
A separate flame for the March 6–15 Winter Paralympics shall be lit on Feb. 24 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England, the birthplace of the Paralympic motion.
