Greece Prepares to Light Olympic Flame

The Olympic flame for this summer's London Games will be lit Thursday in Ancient Olympia, the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) announced on Tuesday.

The Flame will be lit "with every solemnity, according to the traditional way," the HOC said in a statement.

Ceremonies at the site where the first Olympics were held some 2,800 years ago will be attended by International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge, London 2012 Olympics Organizing Committee President Lord Sebastian Coe, as well as other IOC members, British and Greek officials.

"The High Priestess Ino Menegaki will light the Olympic flame directly from the sunrays and then, after the ritual prepared by choreographer Artemis Ignatiou, the sacred light will be handed over to the first torchbearer, Greek world champion swimmer Spyros Gianniotis," the HOC said.

Gianniotis will then pass the torch to Alexander Loukos, a 19-year-old British boxer whose father moved to the United Kingdom from Greece and was picked after helping London win the bid to stage the Games.

An eight-day torch relay covering 2,900km around Greece will follow, taking in five archaeological sites and ending on May 17 with the arrival of the flame at the old Athens Olympic Stadium where the first modern Games were held in 1896.

At an evening ceremony at the stadium the flame will be handed over to the British delegation to continue its journey to London.

The final torchbearers on Greek soil will be Greek Olympic weightlifting champion Pyrros Dimas and Chinese gymnast Li Ning who lit the flame at the 2008 Beijing Games.

For the first time the lighting ceremony will be broadcast live over the Internet.

While the flame has its origins in ancient Greece where a fire was kept burning throughout the Olympics, the torch relay was introduced at the 1936 Berlin Games.