What's Wrong With Russia's Olympic Torch?

In June, the head of Russia's Olympic committee tweeted that the Olympic torch—already bound for a hot-air balloon and a dog sled on its way to the Winter Games in Sochi—would also be going into outer space. In a Putinesque moment, he included a portrait of himself, in full spacesuit.

Nothing is impossible… #Sochi2014 is going to the Space :-) Let's Go - Po-ekhali! pic.twitter.com/20Vp7fFIbD

— Dmitry Chernyshenko (@DChernyshenko) June 24, 2013

Some things are not possible however, like lighting a flame in space. When the torch went up last night, on board a Soyuz craft launching from the Baikanour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, it was not lit. Nor will it be in space because, the AP reported, "lighting it would consume precious oxygen and pose a threat to the crew." I read that section as deadpan. "The crew will carry the unlit torch around the station's numerous modules before taking it out on a spacewalk."

Still, it's been certified: the Russian Olympic Torch has gone above and beyond all other Olympic Torches. The four-month Sochi relay, which started in Moscow on Oct. 7, is the longest in the history of the Olympics, tracing more than 65,000 kilometers, or 39,000 miles, on its way to Sochi. The flame is traveling by plane, by train, by car and even reindeer sleigh, in the hands of over 14,000 torch bearers, who will take it to more than 130 cities and towns. It is the most extreme Flame.

Except, it hasn't really been much of a flame. In the first six days of the relay, the flame spluttered and died at least eight times, according to Dozhd, an independent television and Internet channel. That's bad form, given the flame's ancient Olympic pedigree and the generally understood rule that it not be extinguished. Other reports say that the torch—which was made at a Siberian factory that produces submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and designed to withstand Russia’s extreme weather conditions, including high winds and temperatures that can range from -40 F to 104 F—has already gone out at least 44 times since it started its journey in early October.

"A torch is a lot simpler than a missile—it’s a big gas lighter," Yulia Latynina, a journalist who has been following the relay, said on the radio station Ekho Moskvy. Echoing questions that have circulated around the healthcare.gov debacle, she issued a question to her fellow countrymen: "Do our missiles fly the way our torches burn?"

There were more basic questions too. The All-Russian People’s Front, a pro-Vladimir Putin campaign coalition, has asked investigators to determine if the 207 million roubles—$6.4 million—spent on the torches had been misspent. “Any normal person has a few questions," Mikhail Starshinov, a pro-Putin deputy, told the AFP in early October. "Why were there 16,000 torches made? How much does each one cost? Is the price adequate? Finally, why don’t they work?”

A spokesman for the company that made the torches, KRASMASH, confirmed to the AFP that 16,000 torches were made, "but due to a contractual obligation was unable to elaborate further on the cost."

Russia's torch relay spokesman, Roman Osin, has brushed off speculation about a faulty torch, insisting that there had been similar incidents during the relays before the London and Beijing Olympics, and that an occasional loss of flame was not abnormal.

The problems seemed to begin just minutes after Putin launched the torch by hoisting it high outside the Kremlin last month. In an incident broadcast live on state television, the flame went out while a former Soviet swimming champion named Shavarsh Karapetyan jogged out of the Kremlin gate. A plainclothes guard standing nearby stepped in with a Zippo lighter. It was a somewhat ignominious method considering that the Flame begins its journey each Olympics at the Temple of Hera, lit by a woman in ceremonial robes using a parabolic mirror and the sun's rays. It is there, at ancient Olympus, that, the myth goes, where Prometheus brought the fire he stole from Zeus to give to mankind.

Zippo's Cover Photo For Facebook #ZippoSavesOlympics pic.twitter.com/8IK4ZQjpSr

— Avto Kolashvili (@mdma69s) October 10, 2013

Later that day, Zippo posted the photo on its Facebook page with the hashtag #ZippoSavesOlympics, but it was subsequently removed after threats of legal action from the International Olympic Committee came rolling in.

The lighter incident wasn't without precedent. When an official used a cigarette lighter to relight the flame after it went out in 1976 during the Montreal Olympics, it was doused and relit again using the customary backup flame, which is also from Greece and is transported inside a special, sealed lantern.

Keeping the flame alive at all times leading up to and during the Games is a tradition that began at the first Olympics in Greece, where a flame burned throughout the Games on the altar of the goddess Hestia. But in truth, keeping the Olympic Flame burning isn't a hard and fast rule. While it travels around the world—a tradition that began with the Athens Games in 2004—the torch must sometimes rest. When it's inside, it's extinguished, as the Olympic Flame keeps burning inside that separate lantern. (During the torch's trip to space, the authentic flame will be kept alive back on Earth inside the lantern, which will be used to replenish the torch when it returns to terra firma.)

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Chinese officials insisted on keeping the flame burning as long as possible. "Security people try their best to keep the flame safe," a spokeswoman for the Beijing Organizing Committee told the BBC. "The flame is always burning, whether on the plane or during the relay or overnight. It's kept in the hotel where the core operation team is staying."

The Russian flame isn't always so coy. Sometimes, actually, it has burnt a little too strongly. In one video, shot in Vologda, near Moscow, the flame can be seen expanding to cover the entire upper part of the torch while being held by a man dressed in the blue robe of Grandfather Frost, Russia’s version of Santa Claus.

The faulty flame has inflamed lawmakers and embarrassed President Vladimir Putin, who, like all Olympian presidents, hopes to make the Games a showcase of Russia's modern, developed side, some two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. But delays and cost overruns have dogged the preparations, while the Kremlin faces criticism over a range of issues, from Russia's treatment of gays to a ban on most protests in Sochi to the treatment of the migrant construction workers building the Olympic facilities. (Putin has said gay and lesbian athletes and fans are "welcome" at Sochi, despite the country's politics.)

“We have people responsible for this,” Russia’s sports minister Vitaly Mutko told ITAR-TASS news agency, regarding the flame. “I think that experts will sort it out.”

Whether or not they do in time for the Games in February, the torch is in space. It won't be the first time a torch touched the firmament—Space Shuttle astronauts took it up on Atlantis in 96 for Atlanta's Summer Games—but this will be its first trip into open space.

Now that the flight crew—Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, Russian commander Mikhail Tyurin, and NASA flight engineer Rick Mastracchio—has brought the torch to space, a pair of cosmonauts hopes to photograph the torch as the International Space Station passes over Sochi. It's a bigger feat than it may sound: the spacewalk will take place while the station is at near capacity, with nine astronauts on board in total. It's a situation that strains the space and life support systems on board so much that the only other time it was done, four years ago, NASA decided to "never do it again," writes James Oberg.

The crowdedness won't last long: the torch will come back to Earth next Monday, when Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency plan to land in Kazakhstan. From there, it will travel north to Siberia, and be taken to bottom of the world's deepest lake, the gorgeous Lake Baikal. In February, the torch will be taken to the peak of Mount Elbrus, which, at 18,510 feet tall, is the highest mountain in Russia and Europe.

Last month, the torch traveled to the geographic North Pole aboard the world's largest nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Russian vessel Fifty Years of Victory. The flame stayed lit during the voyage inside a lantern, and was used to light an Olympic cauldron at the pole. In a sign perhaps of some Arctic post-Flame future, the ceremony concluded with a laser light show.

@pasternack