[This is part 7 of our ten day most memorable Olympic moments countdown to the 2012 Olympics. The daily non-Olympian athletic gratuitous eye candy is just a bonus.]

By the 1st of August when you hear the phrase ‘Olympic flame’ you’ll probably immediately think of U.S. Diver Kristian Ipsen. But in addition to hot little gay boys, the Olympic flame is one of the most iconic images of the modern Games. Perched high above the Olympic stadium its lighting and dousing signal the beginning and end of each Olympics; it is a great honor to be the person chosen to light the flame by the host nation, and that person’s identity is usually a closely guarded secret right up to their appearance at the Opening Ceremony.

The Olympic flame’s origins lie in ancient Greece where a fire was kept burning throughout the celebration of the ancient Games. It was reintroduced at the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam and has been a focal point for the Olympics ever since. Equally iconic, and serving to hype the upcoming Games, the Olympic torch too is an important part of the modern Olympics. It is ignited several months before the opening ceremony at the site of the ancient Olympics in Greece and then transported in a relay to the current Olympic stadium.

The torch relay was a common part of ancient celebrations but pales in comparison to its modern day use. For the 2012 Games, it’s estimated the torch will travel to within an hour of 95 per cent of people in the UK on its way to London and will be carried by 8,000 different torchbearers along the way, including several members of the LGBT community. That’s 5,000 more torchbearers than at the Olympic torch’s debut at the 1936 Olympics. And none of those were gay because the host country at that time was forcing gay men to wear pink triangles on their clothes and was busy rounding the flamers up to send them to concentration camps.

Under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels, the Berlin Olympics was the first Games to use the Olympic torch relay to lead up to the Games. Produced by the Krupp armaments company, the torches were transported over 3,187 kilometers by 3,331 runners in twelve days and eleven nights from Greece to Berlin. Hitler’s advisers decided to put emphasize on the propaganda that the ancient gods of Olympus approved of the Berlin Games, and Hitler saw the link with the ancient Games as the perfect way to illustrate his belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich. The relay was later staged again by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1938 film Olympia, part of the Nazi propaganda machine’s attempt to add myth and mystique to Adolf Hitler’s regime.

[‘The XXX Games’ are a series of posts about hot Olympians, gay competitors – both present and past – and general articles about the 2012 London Olympics of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XXX Games graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]