American Carries Torch : His Olympic Moment to Last Forever

It is early evening in the Land of the Morning Calm, and the people of South Korea are about to hand a precious piece of their history to an ugly American.

Actually, I don’t think I’m really an ugly American, just a cynical one. Things like parades and fireworks stopped turning me on when I was about 8. I have always been uneasy with public displays of affection, especially those that are mass produced.

And if there ever was one that could have been inspired by the assembly lines in Detroit, it is the Olympic torch relay, with its free-flowing system of handing off one segment to another until the final flame, the end product of all the segments, is lighted to burn in the Olympic Stadium.

No More Cynicism

So, where is my cynicism as I stand in the middle of a street in this east-central Korean city--a Pacific Ocean, an International Date Line and a world away from friends and loved ones--and watch my torch-carrying predecessor approach from a distance?

Why am I getting goose bumps? Why do I suddenly feel such an affinity for the Koreans and U.S. soldiers lined up on either side of me, poised to serve as my convoy with the torch for the next kilometer?

Why did I feel like Santa Claus for the last half hour or so, as all of them crowded around me to pose for one picture after another with their torch bearer? Why did something that normally would make me feel silly and self-conscious make me feel so good and so proud? Why so much emotion from somebody who has worked so long and hard, for obvious professional reasons, on showing none?

I try to conjure up images of Peter Ueberroth. I tell myself this is all his fault, that his torch relay in 1984 before the Los Angeles Games, an 82-day extravaganza, will never be topped, but can never be skipped in ensuing Olympics. As Carly Simon would say, nobody does it better than Ueberroth. But everybody will keep trying.

Flame and Smoky Haze

The flame is at the top of a small hill now, about to descend toward me and my running convoy. The amount of smoke it generates is momentarily frightening, then almost eerie, like some sort of slow-moving haze that encompasses and protects the party around it.

I can feel electricity in the air. I used to think that was a phrase people used when writing bad novels or bad stories about the day of the Super Bowl. But I actually feel it now, on both sides of me, from the other runners, from the photographers jockeying for position in front of me.

It is kind of a rustle of energy, a swell of anticipation. The only thing I can think of that comes close is the moment just before the start of the Indy 500. But there is some fear mingled with the electricity before Indy. Here, there is no fear, just joy.

I look down the street in the direction I will run. In the last 15 minutes, literally thousands of people have lined up behind ropes on both sides. They are waving flags, or just plain waving. There is a crescendo of noise that is chilling. I try to tell myself that this would not be affecting me like this if I weren’t out there in the center of it all. I’m sure I’m wrong.

I think back to Ueberroth again, and to the stories some members of his Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee told about the creation of the L.A. Games torch relay. Ueberroth wanted a flashy torch run, something that would start in the East and crisscross the country slowly, building interest that would yield a flood of feeling when the Games actually began.

$3,000 Per Runner

The businessman in him also wanted to generate some money from the torch relay, so he decided to charge $3,000 per runner, each to do one kilometer--1,000 meters, about 0.62 mile.

Most of his closest advisers were either appalled or unconvinced. The 82-day period was too long, the $3,000 too mercenary, they said. Arguments ensued. Many meetings were called. The vote was overwhelmingly against him.

A few weeks later, the 82-day Los Angeles Olympic torch relay began, at $3,000 a kilometer.

From its start, interest and feeling built. Apathy for the Olympics was replaced by anticipation. The consensus afterward was that the torch relay, in the form Ueberroth had insisted upon, had been a smashing success, perhaps the single element needed to get Americans to sit up and take notice.

Origins of the Tradition

It strikes me that, possibly because of Ueberroth, the torch relay will always be a part of future Olympics. It also strikes me that those who are anti-Ueberroth might be inspired to some sarcasm at the fact that the first torch relay was the creation of yet another strong leader.

After Amsterdam had lighted a flame over its Olympics in 1928 and Los Angeles had followed up nicely by building a torch holder in the peristyle end of the Coliseum for its games in 1932, Adolf Hitler decided to take things a step further. With propaganda his focal point, Hitler directed that the torch be run over the countryside for more than 3,570 miles in the hands of approximately 3,000 runners, leading to the 1936 Games in Berlin.

But nobody had to pay $3,000.

Now, more than half a century later, I am standing here in South Korea, one of thousands of runners, waiting for the torch. I can start making out some of the features of the man approaching with it. He is Korean and his name is Park Byung Kyu. When I am finished with my kilometer, I will pass to another Korean, Lee Ki Yong.

Before I got to this point, it never even occurred to me that I would want to know the names of the people I receive the torch from and pass it to. Later, I go and find out from officials. There is a special link there.

21,000 Torch Carriers

There will have been 21,000 torch carriers by the time the flame reaches Seoul’s Olympic Stadium Saturday. In that number are five American newspapermen. I am about to go first, to be followed in the next few days by John Jeansonne of Newsday, Tom Weir of USA Today, John Husar of the Chicago Tribune and Dave Dorr of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We have been told that we were chosen because of our papers’ outstanding coverage of Olympic-related events.

Actually, I don’t know if that’s why I was chosen or not, but the way I feel now, as my Korean colleague approaches, I’m glad I agreed to run.

I wish the tingling would go away but I hope it doesn’t.

I am thinking of what some of the members in my party told me a few hours ago, when we arrived in Wonju. They said that this might be the biggest thing to happen in this town since the Korean War.

I scoffed at that at first, but it was coming from Sam Jameson, who has been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Tokyo and Asia for many years, and from our interpreter, Chi Jung Nam, who has lived in South Korea all his life and writes for Asian Business magazine.

Children Waving Flags

There are people everywhere now--schoolchildren waving little South Korean flags, mothers with infants wrapped on their backs, tiny elderly men and women with deeply wrinkled faces crinkled in wide grins. Some of these older people lined up for spots along this street more than an hour ago and have been standing all this time. Many of them appear to be in their 80s.

Maybe Jameson and Chi are right. This just may be the biggest thing to happen here since those terrible days in the 1950s. Maybe this, more than any long-jump records or basketball gold medals, is what the Olympics really are all about.

When we arrived in Wonju in mid-afternoon, they took our party to a celebration festival at the city’s stadium. The population here is about 160,000, and the stadium is eight years old and sparkling. It is one of the many tangibles that will be left in this country by the Olympics. Without the prospect of Seoul ‘88, frills such as Wonju Stadium would never have been considered.

While dancers in native garb performed on stadium’s center stage, Mayor Cho Sung Woon was called from the crowd to greet our party. Outside the stadium, there was more native dancing on a side stage. As we stood on the edge of the crowd, watching the show, we were quickly ushered to chairs in the front row. Elderly men and women got up to make room for us, and no amount of protest by us could change it. The Koreans are proud, friendly people who want the rest of the world to know that.

Sister City of Roanoke

Wonju is a sister city to Roanoke, Va. It proudly displays that fact on the walls of its city hall. I can’t help but wonder if Roanoke--or any other American city--would treat visiting Koreans as well as visiting Americans were treated by Wonju.

But now, the moment is almost upon me. When Park arrives with the torch, he is flushed from his run and not altogether happy that it is over. He slows down over the last few meters, cherishing the moment, holding it. Suddenly, we are encircled by photographers and cars with officials. A helicopter buzzes overhead.

We face each other, each with a torch in hand, and he lights my torch with his. It is a strange moment. We speak different languages, think different ways, live 7,000 miles apart. I know nothing about him, he nothing about me.

He says something to me that I don’t understand, but then I do. I’m pretty sure it means: “You’ll love this.”

‘Easiest Run of My Life’

And I do, as I begin my kilometer down the center of the main street of Wonju. Schoolchildren are waving, old people are waving. Everybody is smiling. It is an overwhelming, almost sensual feeling. I haven’t trained that hard, but this clearly will be the easiest run of my life. I could go 10 miles. I feel like Joan Benoit coming into the Coliseum.

As I look at the people lining the streets, waving and applauding, I feel a moment of guilt. I think of what these people have been through, how their homeland remains torn in two, and how not even one leg of this torch relay should be wasted on somebody who isn’t Korean.

I watch the faces as I run. I see no resentment, no looks of wonderment at why some large Caucasian is carrying their torch to their Olympics through their town. And I remember the story that one of my Korean friends from Los Angeles told me.

When he was a child in Seoul, the Korean War raged around him. On the street where he lived, a North Korean general also lived. Often, American planes would strafe the homes of North Korean military officials.

U.S. Plane Strafed Area

One night, an American fighter plane took a run at my friend’s neighborhood. His family was sleeping together on the floor, and his sister was directly to his left, lying on her back with her knees up. The plane came in from his left, strafing the area, and a bullet ripped through his sister’s knee. Had his sister had her knees down, the bullet would have struck and probably killed him. Instead, he watched as his sister bled to death in minutes.

After he told me that story, I speculated that he must harbor some hatred for Americans.

“Oh, no,” he said. “The Americans drove Communists out. They saved us.”

The faces along the way are friendly, but worn. I wave and they wave back. And I wonder what some of them have been through.

Chi, our interpreter, had told us earlier in the afternoon about the hills around Wonju. He said they were a favorite area of the postwar partisans, Communist guerrillas who kept fighting for two or three years after the Korean War had ended. They were the toughest of the tough, he said, living off the land through harsh winters and hot summers.

“When they had no boots, they walked through the snow, up to their knees, in bare feet,” he said.

Armed Soldiers in Van

I can’t help but think that, although the war is over for these people, the constant threat posed by the north makes living here a tenuous business. I glance to my right as I run and see a van full of soldiers. Each has a machine gun in his hands. None is smiling.

I can see the next runner ahead now. My little piece of torch history is about to end. I can see now how every runner will have a story and a special memory of this.

It will be hard to top the memory of Yoshinori Saki, the last of 100,000 runners in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics torch relay. Saki was chosen to be the last because he had been born in Hiroshima the day the atomic bomb was dropped.

Or Enriquela Basilio, the last torch bearer in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and the first woman to light the Olympic flame.

Or Sandra Henderson and Stephane Prefontaine, the two 15-year-olds who jointly lighted the flame, ending a four-day torch relay at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Later, Henderson and Prefontaine were married.

Boy and Girl Were First

The first two torch bearers this year, when the flame got to South Korea, were a 12-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl. Will history repeat itself?

Lee awaits me now, directly ahead. I slow a bit, cherishing the moment, holding it. The photographers crowd in again, the various support vehicles surround us. I stop, reach out and light his flame.

It is a strange moment. I know nothing about him, he nothing about me. He stares at me for a moment and I say something to him that he doesn’t understand. But then he does.

“You’ll love it,” I say.

And he will.

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