Stuff You Should Know - Olympic Torches: Remember Those?

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Back in the pre-pandemic days we had a sporting event called The Olympic Games. And at those games there was an opening ceremony that featured the lighting of a cauldron from a torch. Let's chat about that, eh? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This season on Running the Break with CJ and Alex. Rapper Meek Mill, so obviously huge ties to Philly was at a Sixers game recently. And in what seemed like a real life curb your enthusiasm episode, he accidentally tripped a ref sitting courtside as the ref was running back up court. You know what CJ? I gotta say, I feel like that should be a technical foul, one free throw for the opposing team. Yes.

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Make every moment more with FanDuel Sportsbook, an official partner of the NBA. Hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we have a book coming out finally, finally after all these years. It's great. It's fun. You're going to love it. It's called Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting

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And so should you. So pre-order now, it means a lot to us. The support is a very big deal. So pre-order anywhere books are sold. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

What is this going to do with the Olympics? It's equally stirring. I thought you had done the Olympic Games song. That's what I started out doing, and then about two duns into it, I realized they could not bring it to mind, so I just went with the Rocky theme instead. You know, the Olympics, well, I don't know if they, would they still be going on right now, or they'd be over? I don't know.

They could have just wrapped up, actually. It's kind of sad, you know? It's sad for now. It will be encouraging later. I think the Tokyo Olympics, whenever they happen, are going to be a global coming together and celebration of beating coronavirus. Yeah, totally. They'll have to redo those ceremonies.

Yes, but from what I read, the Olympic flame is still alive and well in Tokyo. What if the opening ceremonies had little, you know, corona crowns running around and people smashing them with like big inflatable hammers and... That's right. They tell the story of the coronavirus pandemic through interpretive dance. It just has like a big giant bat at the beginning. Yeah, exactly. It's the villain. Oh, man.

There'd be plenty of villains in that one. That'd be fun. For sure. For sure. So, we're obviously talking Olympic torches if you hadn't guessed or hadn't bothered to look at the title of this episode, everybody. And I'm kind of excited about this because it's just died in the wool SYSK episode and that it's very niche.

It's about one specific thing that's a part of a much larger thing, which we've not yet done an episode on. Yeah, and the kind of thing where one day when you're watching an Olympic ceremony again, you see that flame, you'll have that insider knowledge. Yeah, you'll think... Oh, goodness. So, Chuck, I didn't know much about Olympic torches. I've seen a torch lighting or two in my time on television only. But it's pretty interesting actually, the kind of the history of it and how the things

are made. I guess you'd call it like a request for proposal, PDF from the London Olympics Committee from years ago, basically saying, hey, this is a call out to all designers who want to try their hand at designing the London Olympic torch. Here's all the details you need to know. It was really fascinating stuff and we're going to convey that fascination post-haste. Of that RFP or of just the torches. Maybe a little bit of both actually.

So the history of the torch, we're talking... You got to go back to Greece if you're going to talk about anything Olympic history-wise. And if you go back far enough, you're going to hear a story about Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, giving that to humans. That's how they say we got fire. In order to commemorate that, the Greeks had these relay races like we all know and love except instead of passing a little aluminum baton, they would pass live fire and flame via torch.

Yeah. They would set a cow on fire, push it to the next person. Actually, the one thing on Prometheus, I was looking him up. So he was punished by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humans. For being a bad boy. Yeah, a naughty Monty. And he had his liver eaten out by an eagle every day and because he was an immortal titan, his liver would grow back each night and then it would be eaten out by an eagle again the

next day. That's what I feel these days. And the eagle's eating your liver every day. Yeah, it is kind of 2020. But it regenerates though. Yeah. But I guess the upshot of all this is that fire was extremely important to the Greeks and they showed it off as much.

So when they started having Olympic games back in, I guess, 776 BCE, they wanted to make fire kind of a prominent part of it. And so they celebrated this theft of fire from Zeus by Prometheus by having a torch relay where there was basically like today's baton relay marathons or runs or whatever you call them. But it was with the torch and whoever reached the end with their lit torch won that relay race. And that's how kind of the Olympic torch was born.

Yeah. And the games back then were a very big deal in that they would stop war, which is something they love to do just to take part in these games. And they had these runners, they called them heralds of peace that would go all through Greece saying, you know, truce everybody right, and they would hope they don't get speared. And if they made it through, that truce would remain all during the Olympics until the flame is extinguished and then they start spearing again immediately. Yeah.

And the point was so that anybody who wanted to go watch the Olympics could make it through Greece unkilled to go watch and then make it back home unkilled, hopefully too. Unkilled. Yeah. And so if you go back to Olympia, there was an altar there dedicated to Hera, who's the goddess of birth and marriage. And at the beginning of those first Olympic games, they would ignite a cauldron at Hera's altar and they would light it with a parabolic mirror.

They call it a scoffia and it's sort of like, you know, an Archimedes death ray where you or a magnifying glass or something where you focus the sun down to that, you know, single spot, if you're a sadistic child, you burn ants that way, you should never do that. No. It's not nice. No, leave the ants alone. Leave the ants alone. But that's how they would ignite that initial flame and that flame, the idea is that it

stays lit throughout the Olympics. Yeah. So this is a pretty cool tradition if you think about it. I mean, just because the Olympics have been around for so long today, the modern Olympics, we kind of take this whole thing for granted, but like this is a pretty neat tradition that I guess just came up out a whole cloth among the Greeks. And so they were like, we're going to keep this going. And they did for another thousand years while they did the Olympics.

But then when the Olympics kind of died out after a millennia, no, millennium, the torch and all of that stuff died out with it. Fortunately, the Greeks were a highly literate society and they wrote a lot of this stuff down and it was rediscovered when the Olympics were revived in the 19th century by a guy named Baron Pierre de Coubertin. And he, one of the things that he did was to say, I really love the Olympic games. I'm not necessarily aware that there was a torch relay or anything like that. So we're going to wait another 30 years or so before we introduce the torch again.

That's right. That came in 1928 in Amsterdam and there they had the cauldron on fire on purpose. But they weren't relaying that torch still. It took till 1936 in Berlin when Carl Diem, he was the secretary general of the organizing committee of the games there. And he said, hey guys, we got to bring this back to the OGs and we got to get that torch relay going and we got to light it in Olympia and get it here to Berlin. We got to do it right.

Yeah. He definitely did it right for sure. I mean, not only was like the whole thing revived like the idea of the torch relay, but igniting that torch in Greece and then having it make its way all the way to Berlin. That's pretty cool stuff. And from what I read that was also right up the Nazis alley in that it kind of connected the third Reich to the great Greek and Roman empires of Yor, which they were super into to try to legitimize themselves.

So they went for it. Fortunately, that first Olympic torch, which we'll talk more about the torches, did not have a swastika anywhere on it, which is wonderful that they managed to keep that off of there. I know. That's kind of surprising too, huh? It is extremely surprising, but I mean, it really is genuinely surprising and I'm like very pleased. I was really pleased.

I looked at pictures of that torch with like one eye closed and I was like, no, no, just I was afraid I was going to see it and I couldn't believe it and little by little I was like, it's not there. So I was pleased by that. You have it. My eyes. My eyes. I just turned into toth from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and melt.

So the relay at the Winter Olympics, I think it took until 1952 to introduce it at the Winter Games and they did not light it in Olympia that year. They lit it in Norway because that's where the skiing was born. So they thought they would honor Norway in that way. But finally, finally in 1964 in Austria at Innsbruck, they said, we got to get it together, everybody. We got to get on the same page. We got to go winter and summer and started out in Olympia and relay that thing to wherever the heck we're going to have these games.

That's right. And they did. And I actually looked a little bit into the, I guess the 1952 games where they lit it in Norway. They lit it in the hearth of the home of 19th century Norwegian skiing legend, Sandra Norheim. It's either Sandra or Sondri, S-O-N-D-R-E. And he was apparently quite the daredevil skier. I saw a quote about him that he was fearless and daring.

He ran straight down the most dangerous and challenging hills, rudely waving his cap, which just made me love that guy immediately. Yeah, and I think those games ended up in Helsinki, but well, there's a little nugget I'll drop in the next segment here after we break. Oh, I can't wait. Well, I've got another segment or another nugget on that. One other time in history when the winter Olympic torch was lit in the hearth of the home of 19th century Norwegian skiing legend, Sondri Norheim, was in Squaw Valley in 1960

because the Olympic committee couldn't get their act together fast enough to organize the lighting ceremony in Greece. So Norway stepped in again and said, she's got a fireplace. We've seen it in action. He, he. Oh, he. Yeah. Party at Sondri's house.

All right. I'm sure we're mispronouncing it. Probably so. Rudely waving his cap. You want to take a break yet? Let's do it. All right, everybody. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and guess what we're going to

talk about Olympic torches some more. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. Let's talk about those RFPs that thrill me so fully. Yeah, if you want to be the firm, the design firm that builds designs and builds the torch, you got to get in there and you got to submit your proposal.

You got to grease some palms. You got to tip the right doorman if you know what I mean. You have to spread many goats around to the right people. No, I think you just submit a proposal and the Olympic committee looks at it and they sort of sit there like at the beginning of planes, trains, and automobiles for three hours in silence, kind of twiddling their thumbs, looking, looking, looking, and finally they say, the bid goes to you. You win the assignment.

You've got to have a torch that looks great, of course, and you've got to have a torch that works because this thing has got to, it's got to stay lit under any condition. It can be, you can get this thing through a hurricane supposedly and it'll have to stay lit. Yeah. I mean, they're pretty serious about this thing not going out. So they build in redundancies. Oftentimes, there's a couple of different flames working in conjunction to make this

thing work, but in addition to the actual feel of it and the look of it, like you want to make it so that anybody, anybody basically alive on earth could carry it. So it's got to be lightweight typically. I saw usually about a pound or so. It has to... Oh, is that all? Most of the ones in that RFP, the Golden RFP from the London Olympics, it had a list. Actually you got to look this up, everybody.

I cannot remember. Just search London Olympic Torch Proposal, Design Proposal, I bet that would bring up this PDF. Anyway. Some sleepy corner of the internet first. Yeah. I found it and I'm proud as punch about that, but it had a list of some of the specs of past torches and most of them seem to be around one to two pounds.

This article from How Stuff Works is three to four, but I saw one to two pounds. Maybe that's without being fully loaded with fuel. Sure. And hey, if you can carry something that's two pounds, you can probably put two hands on it and manage the four pounds. Sure. Sure. You can hold it with one hand.

Yeah, just because it looks cooler. These modern torches that we're looking at were sort of originated at the Squall Valley Games in 1960 when a Disney artist named John Hench designed this, you know, sort of the first modern torch that everyone else said, yeah, that's a good idea. That's what we should do. We should have fuel inside of it and we should have some backup flame inside of it. And they kind of function like a camp stove. Sure.

A fancy camp stove basically is what it is. And we'll get into the fuels and stuff, but in that there is a liquid fuel that becomes a gas, you know, it's under pressure and then it comes out these tiny little holes, just like a camp stove or a Coleman lantern. Yeah, and I didn't know this. This is pretty cool. There are two things that have to be designed into it, or a couple of things that have to be designed into it, in addition to being easy to carry by basically anybody, it has

to be very light, it has to be aerodynamic, ergonomic, I think is another. If you threw that word around in your bid, they would probably be like, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about. But you also have to, at least as far as London was concerned, but I got the impression that this was a standard thing that you have to design in a way to permanently deactivate it after it's one time use so that it can never be lit again, which I thought was kind of cool. I bet you could hack that though.

Funny enough, I found another weird corner of the internet researching this one at OlympicTorchRepair.com, which is possibly the most niche retail website I've ever seen in my life. They sell one part, and it is a part designed to fix the 1996 Atlanta Olympic torch, and they don't use the words that it will be lit again, but just from the pictures, from the text, from everything that I'm seeing, I believe this is a rogue website dedicated to making 1996 Atlanta Olympic torches burn again after they've been purposefully disabled. Well, and you might be laughing saying, how much could this person be making off this? But here's another little fun fact.

There are anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 of these torches that are built, if you'll notice when you see these, you know, and they don't cover all of this thing, or maybe they do on some dark corner of the internet. I'm sure somebody does, I might end up doing it in the future as a hobby. There's each and every passing of the torch, but they don't actually pass the torch. They light the other person's torch, and then they run away, and then you never, the camera doesn't hang on the person who just, you know, is standing there with their torch, and you think, what happens to those things?

Well, you're allowed to buy it if you want. The one from Japan this year was going to cost about 600, 650 bucks, American. That's a steal. Have you seen that thing? Yeah, it's good looking. Have you seen the overhead shot where it looks like a cherry blossom? It's wonderful. I think so too.

And that is a price that's basically at cost, because the IOC, nor the AOC, can profit from the sale of Olympic torches. That is not a side hustle for her. No. Don't believe what the right says. I know. She can't actually make any money off of Olympic torches. So that's basically cost, and it turns out there's quite an aftermarket for these things

too. I think there are right now two complete collections for individuals in the world, and another guy that's close. And they cost anywhere from 1500 to 4000 for the newer ones, 15 to 70 grand for older ones. And I think the priciest ever was that 1952 Helsinki one. How much? $880,000. Oh boy.

Because they only made 22 of them. So obviously, rarity is going to drive that price up. The highest I saw was less than that, is 215,000 for the 1960 Squaw Valley one that Disney designer made. And I think I saw like they made 100 of them. So you'd have to have some coin to have a complete collection. And that's a very niche collection as well. I mean, more power to you.

And I have to say, like a lot of them, they're not very pleasing to the eye. There's some Ugg Olympic torches out there. I mean, Mexico City 1968 is, if it's not a hand whisk, I don't know what it is. Well, it's homey maybe. It is. And it was cool. It actually, according to the 2012 London Olympics torch RFP PDF, that is the longest I'm making t-shirts out of different pages.

That is the longest burning Olympic torch in the history of Olympic torches. Most of these things are designed to burn 10 or 15 minutes, which is alarming if you're like, well, wait a minute, we don't want the Olympic flame to burn out. But as we'll see, these relays are actually super short. This one, the Mexico City 1968 torch could burn up to 30 minutes. Dude, I like this torch. The whisk. I think it looks great.

I think it looks like a whisk. I don't think it looks bad. I just think it looks like a kitchen whisk and I can't think of anything else, but whipping cream when I look at it. I'm looking at two different torches, though, for Mexico. One looks like a whisk and one looks like sort of like an Aztec club. So there's two torches. I don't know.

I'm going to have to get to the bottom of this. Okay. Because I'm seeing two torches. Let me know what you find because I'm going to have to add it to my niche website about Olympic torches. Oh, goodness. So I don't remember where we were going with that. Oh, you're talking about the Tokyo one where you can buy it.

Yeah, sure. So when you have the torch, when your torch relay is done, it's taken from you, disabled, put in its packaging and then presented to you if you've indicated you want to buy it. And if not, they throw it into the nearest river. But I think that's pretty cool that you get to buy it if you want to and it's disabled so you can never light it again unless you know the guy who runs the Olympic torch repair. But one of the other things too that they, they has become kind of a thing, especially in the last like 30, 30 years or maybe more is sustainability built into these.

And you want to, it's not a requirement, but I get the impression from that RFP that you, you're probably doing nothing but helping your bid. If you have figured out some sort of sustainable angle to it, like the Tokyo torch, which again, it's just gorgeous. It's rose gold looking, but it's actually aluminum. And the aluminum is made from former temporary housing that was used after the Fukushima disaster to house some of the residents who've been displaced. They're really pulling at the heartstrings there.

Yeah. Yes. I'm sure the person who designed that was like, I got it. I got the thing that's going to get. We're going to win this bid with this. And they're like, is it true? No, but they don't know. I mean, no, I shoot down airplanes in my spare time.

I have a bunch of them in my backyard. Now I know what to do with it. I like the view from the top better. Yeah. It's gorgeous. And the side. Yes. And one of the things, I mean, we talked about flames and them being redundant.

You don't want that flame to go out. So one of the things that that 2020 torch has is from each of those rounded petals that looks like the petal of a cherry blossom flower provides a flame. And they all come together to build one big flame. But because you have five different smaller flames, that big flame, even if it flickers or wanes, it's never going to go out. Yeah. You've got five redundancies.

Exactly. So the fuel, they've used a bunch of things over the years because you want something to burn bright, something that you can see during the daytime. You want something that's not dangerous. But there have been some dangerous torches over the years. They've used gunpowder. They've used olive oil. They used to use something called hexamine, which is formaldehyde pneumonia.

Can't be safe. And naphthalene. So in our soap episode, Chuck, one of the things I didn't get to talk about was that fells naphthalondry soap. Yeah. You ever seen that stuff? I don't think so. It's like this hipsterrific laundry soap that's old-timey that they still make.

But naptha is benzene, and it's actually really, really bad for you. So they were basically burning benzene in this stuff. You can, all sorts of bad things can happen, like your red blood cells can rupture. Yeah. That's no good. You can also have nasty smoke, like in the case of Atlantis, was pretty smoky. In 1956, they had magnesium and aluminum lighting the flame. And there were chunks of flame that fell off.

So you don't want that either. You want something that burns clean, that looks good. I think now they use propane and butane, which makes a lot of sense. That's what you use in lighters and in gas grills. And like I said, it works like a little camp stove. You've got this fuel being pushed through a valve. There's a fuel reservoir, and then you have all these little tiny openings, just like a camp stove will.

And once it squeezes through there, it builds up that pressure. Then finally, once it's out the other side, that pressure drops, turns into a gas, and it's ready to burn at a consistent rate. Right. And again, there's a couple of flames, typically one that burns really hot, but small. That is almost like a pilot light for the bigger ones, and that 2020 torch, there's five of those things. And then you've got the bigger, brighter flame that is big and bold and just says, in your

face world, I'm the Olympic flame, but it's much less stable. It flickers a lot more in the wind, but it's not going to go out because you got those pilot lights. It's sort of like the understudy to the Broadway star. Yeah, but the understudy is really the one who's giving the star all of the suggestions and notes that are making the star a star. And we'll get to the route here in a few minutes, but this thing goes a long way, and sometimes even across oceans and sometimes under water, which is what happened in 2000 when it went

across the Great Barrier Reef very symbolically, and they had a flare inside this thing to keep the flame burning in the water, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. Did you see video of that? Yeah. I saw it live. Oh, you did, huh? Sure.

Oh, that's neat. I'm an Olympics guy. I love that stuff. That's cool. Yeah, I didn't see that. I like the Olympics too. I don't know if I'd see him on an Olympics guy, but you're an Olympic torch RFP guy. Yeah, that's way more of my alley than running around.

Should we take another break? Yeah, I think we've reached break time if you ask me. All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about lighting this thing and then that big relay right after this. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb

her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cold classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, so we're back to talk about the actual lighting of this thing. If you guys will remember, we talked about lighting the torch using a parabolic mirror

to concentrate the sun's rays all the way back in the 770s BCE. Well, when the Olympic organizers of the modern Olympics started bringing the torch back, I guess what was his name, Karl Bernheim? I think it was the German guy from the 1936 Olympics. I believe he went right to it. He was also sports historian, by the way, which gives away why he was so privy to all this stuff. But I guess since that time, every time we've lit a torch from Olympia, they have used a

parabolic mirror to concentrate the sun's rays and they stick a torch in there and it catches flame. And then there you have the official Olympic flame that will make its way from Olympia to the host city somehow, some way. Yeah, they make a big show of it. They have an actor dressed as a ceremonial priestess in these robes and like the ancient Greeks. And they, you know, they act it out and for the winter games, they actually, the relay

begins at the monument to the guy who spoke of earlier, Pierre de Cobortin, who founded those first games. But the summer games, a.k.a. the other games, are carried to a firepot at that altar of, was it Hera? Yeah, Hera, Zeus's wife, sister, sister wife. And then the relay begins. And you know, how this works out is determined at every Olympics. The organizing committee determines the route.

There's always some silly Olympic theme. I know it's not always silly, sometimes it's nice, but I'm not a big theme guy. No, you didn't like the theme of the 1996 Olympics. What's it? I knew you were going to bring that up. That was the mascot. That wasn't the theme. Oh, I thought it was both.

I think the theme was Red Neckary. It was. It was, the theme was get or done. I was looking online today because remember they had those, I've talked about them before, those stainless steel pickup trucks in Atlanta and I was like, where are those things now? And I could find, Neri, any evidence that they ever existed. So I don't know if they scrub the internet, but I know you're better at the dark corners of the web.

I'll see what I can do. Maybe we'll go in together and buy one. That would be pretty awesome, actually. So you know, like I said, the route is determined by the committee. Sometimes it goes from country to country on a plane. Sometimes it's a train. There have been dog sleds. There's been motorcycles and horseback.

And if you are a person who is tasked with carrying this thing, like I think you have to be able to go at least 437 yards, 400 meters, got to be at least 14 years old. I would like to throw our name in the hat, quite frankly, for a future Olympic Games. That'd be kind of neat. That'd be fun. I'd be willing to carry it with you. We could each put a hand on it. But you've done something for the community, or you're a notable human being, or you work

for the company who's sponsoring the Olympics. Right. You're a sea level executive. Which is absolutely true. We're not kidding. No. No. And I mean, like there's sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of people who are involved

in this. If you're running like basically a football field and a half, and you're going, you're taking this thing thousands of kilometers, right? You need a lot of people to do that. So there's a lot of people involved in the Olympic relay. So there's a lot of people who, yeah, just kind of ended up there because they were a sponsor. But there's also interesting people too.

Sure. Sometimes they're not even people, buddy. I was looking at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics relay, and there was a robot named Hubo who was a torch bearer. And Hubo not only carried the torch, Hubo drove the torch in like basically a doom buggy with a human being in the passenger seat and then got out, approached a brick wall, almost fell over, was righted by some other humans, cut through the brick wall, and then passed the torch through the hole, Hubo had cut into the brick wall.

That's the level of zaniness that can be achieved with the torch relay because there's so many people involved. Can you imagine being that guy? It's like, did you see the Olympics the other day in the torch relay? Oh, did you carry the torch? No, I rode in the doom buggy of the robot. Right. Just looking very nervous.

I was a failsafe, you know, in case he went nuts. It was pretty great. They also did paragliding. They paraglided the torch from one place to another. It's pretty cool. Like people, they try to do each other, each host city tries to outdo the last. I think Montreal is the one that has everybody beat. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Let me go on. So in 1976 Montreal hosted the Olympics and they figured out how to take the flame, transmit it into a radio signal. I'm still not sure how they do this. Shot that signal up to a satellite and then beam the signal back down from a satellite to Canada where it lit another cauldron, another torch. So they basically transferred the energy from the Olympic flame, shot it into space and

then transferred it back to Earth and converted it back into flame. No one's ever going to beat that. I think that's cute that you bought that. Oh, well, okay. I guess, yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. You didn't see the guy who was in the buggy. He was also behind there punching the button. Yeah, that's the thing.

The relight button. It is a thing for sure. And now you hadn't really thought about that. So if you do notice these people that are actually on the street carrying these things, you'll notice they have security. There's actually a medical team. There's plenty of media. They have extra torches on hand because they don't want that thing to go out on camera.

And eventually it's going to make its way to the Olympic Stadium where the big secret, you know, they keep it a big secret now who that final individual is going to be. Pretty much kept a lid on because you don't want that getting out because that's the big moment. And that's always a big deal, whoever they choose for that final person to light the cauldron. And there have been a lot of big, big moments throughout the years. And I think Atlanta's, when they came in there, Janet Evans, she didn't even know who

she was going to hand it to. And Outcomes Muhammad Ali, that was really one of the great Olympic moments. I've watched it again today and I was like, why am I crying? What is wrong with me? It is amazing to hear that crowd when they figure out who it is at first. And apparently no one knew. Like maybe it was Costas who was doing the... Probably Costas, yeah.

I think it was because he hadn't gotten pink eye that year. So he was still good to be the commentator. It was Costas and somebody else and they didn't know apparently. And I guess Dick Erbersall, who was a longtime NBC executive. Have you ever read that book live from New York about Saturday Night Live? No, but I knew that he was, that he took over for a little while. Yeah. He figures big in there.

And I can't remember if he did a good job or a bad job, but I have a good impression of him. So I think he did get. But anyway, he figures big into that book and that book is definitely worth reading. It like goes up to maybe the mid to late 80s from the start to the mid to late 80s. And it's all just like behind the scenes interviews and gossip and oral history of the whole thing. It's really interesting. But anyway, Dick Erbersall lobbied really hard to get Muhammad Ali to be the guy because

it was originally going to be a Vander Holyfield. And Holyfield actually ran it for about 10 feet and then handed it off to Janet Evans. Yeah. They had to get him in there. Yeah. And then Janet Evans took it up this ramp. And then all of a sudden it looks like Janet Evans is going to be the one to light it. And then all of a sudden at the top of the ramp, Muhammad Ali pops out and he punches

Janet Evans in the face. And the crowd just goes nuts, especially when he has it lit and he like holds it aloft and his hand is trembling from with Parkinson's tremors. And they just are going bonkers. It was it's just like you said, it's probably the all time great Olympic moment as far as America is concerned. A few other highlights in Barcelona 92 who can forget Paralympic archer Antonio Rebolo. That's a great one too.

When he shot that fiery arrow. That was pretty sweet. I can't believe he made it too. Like that just the that what they gambled on that, you know, he could have missed it could have gone out and it didn't and he made it and it lit the cauldron and it's just beautiful. Well, it actually didn't light the cauldron, but that was the please stop dashing the Olympic torch in the ignition button because you can't take that chance. You know, I'll tell you what, Chuck.

When I form my weird niche little Olympic torch website, it's going to be all fantasy. None of this behind the scenes trickery grittiness. It's just going to be face value stuff. 64 Tokyo when they hosted their first games. They had the Hiroshima baby a.k.a. Johanori Sakai was born on August 6, 1945, the day Americans dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. He was 19 years old at the time.

He lit that thing. What about the soul and those cooked dubs? That was rough, man. I wasn't aware of that until we were researching this. Were you? I don't remember that. I mean, I certainly watched the games that year, but I was probably too young to understand that those dubs did not make it out alive.

Dude, yeah, I put my hand in my mouth like, oh my God, I can't believe what I just saw. That was awful. So they released the dubs as part of the opening ceremony, and then some of the dubs gathered in the cauldron. It's not funny. I don't know why I'm laughing. No. There's a certain element to it that's funny, but in the worst way, you know what I mean?

And the three people whose job it was to light the Olympic cauldron with their torches, they did and some of the birds didn't fly away. Yeah, and you can see some of them sort of dancing in the flame. That part's awful, but the whole idea of the thing is just so preposterous and contrary to what they're trying to do with the Olympic spirit, that they sacrifice some dubs. Yeah, that was tough to watch. So then there's one more, there's a bunch worth mentioning, but it's worth watching again, is Lillehammer 1994, where Stein Gruben ski jumper skis down a ski jump 70 meters,

which is quite a few feet, more than 70 meters. Well, it's the exact same as 70 meters, but in feet, just going some ridiculous speed with the torch that won't go out and like lands this jump just beautifully. That was a little nerve wracking, even knowing that it didn't go out. When I was watching it the other day, I was like, don't go out. Don't go out. Right. Yeah, because it looks like it could have at any moment, but no, it stayed straight.

And then let's see, there's a couple more worth mentioning 1996, 2000 and 2014, the flame went to space, which is pretty cool. Let's not forget 1976 in Montreal. And then it was on the Concorde once, it flew on the Concorde. And I believe 1992 for the Barcelona games. Amazing. So that's it for the Olympic torch, everybody. We'll talk more about the Olympics someday when we do an episode on the Olympics.

But in the meantime, hope you enjoyed this. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this Chuck, Check Your Privilege. Did you see this one? Yeah. Hey guys, this is in reference to your WASP podcast. Great information. Love the podcast, but at the end it was almost amusing that you assumed people have the means

to hire a professional to remove a WASP nest from their property. I said almost. Almost amusing. Equally amusing, which I guess is equally almost amusing, is the idea of fashioning a kind of trap. I don't remember that part. Did you say that? I don't know.

I say a lot of things. Ask being stung dozens of times for what? Guys, I don't think you should be shoving PETA style, end quotes, non-lethal rhetoric down people's throats, nay saying the killing of vermin and pest, especially when your solutions don't accommodate outside the middle class. Pretty sure there are poverty-stricken individuals that love to learn and love this podcast as well. You very well could be unintentionally alienating them into thinking that they are being inhumane

when in fact they have no choice. Think bigger picture, Chuck. That is from James Huggins. I didn't mean to do that, James. I'm sorry. I think the overarching message was leave it alone. Don't do anything to it. Don't spend money.

I've never paid money to have a WASP nest removed. Do you know, Chuck, I have to tell you just yesterday I was challenged to live up to my own words. There was a WASP in our screen porch and I had a fly swatter and was trying to just lightly move it out. I was like, I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to kill you. He's like, I know what that thing is.

He wouldn't, number one, he wouldn't come after me. We proved that WASPs are not necessarily super aggressive like they have a reputation for it. But then he also wouldn't make his way toward the open door, right? So I thought of this ingenious method. I grabbed like a little bowl, which virtually anyone on earth can afford, put the bowl over the WASP so that it was trapped between the bowl and the screen. Then I took the fly swatter and I slid it up between the bowl and the screen to create

a cover for the bowl and then ran that thing right out of the porch, removed the fly swatter from the bowl and the WASP flew away like, have a good day. Amazing. That's Emily Smith. It's like a magazine and like a Tupperware for kind of any beast. Works pretty well. Yeah. And that's not elitist.

No, it's not. I don't disagree with James's overall message. I think it was more his delivery that's a little, you know, you know. Needs work. Sure. Okay. So if you want to get in touch with us and we can do what we will with your email, you can send it to us at stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. From the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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