Friday 27 August 2010

.... and the flame is extinguished

These past two weeks we have been celebrating The 2010 Summer Youth Olympics. 

Officially known as the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games (YOG), which was an international multi-sport event for youths that took place in the city-state of Singapore from 14 to 26 August 2010, in the XXIX Olympiad. It was the inaugural Summer Youth Olympics, a major sports and cultural festival celebrated in the tradition of the Olympic Games. Three thousand, five hundred and thirty-one athletes between 14 and 18 years of age from 204 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) competed in 201 events in 26 sports.

Last night - August 26 2010 - the flame was extinguished at the Closing Ceremony. 


The 32-metre (105 ft) tall cauldron was designed by Dr. Tsai Her-Mann, a fellow and resident inventor of the Singapore Science Centre. Designed to look like a lighthouse, its distinctive feature is a swirling 8 m (26 ft) column of fire dubbed the "vortex flame" or "fire tornado" inside a tube with an opening at the top end. Hot air that can reach 300 °C (572 °F) created around the flame rises, drawing cool air upwards from openings in the base of the tower. Just below the glass-panelled portion of the tower, the cool air is driven through angled guide vanes, thus creating the spiralling movement travelling upwards at 20 m/s (66 ft/s). The cauldron, which has been patented in Singapore and the United States, consumes about 2 MW (2,700 hp) of fuel, less than half the amount used by conventional Olympic cauldrons. Dr. Tsai has said he hopes his design can be used for other Olympic events in future. The cauldron was secretly tested at 4:00 am during the two months leading up to the opening ceremony.

 

 The Olympic flame is a practice continued from the ancient Olympic Games. In Olympia (Greece), a flame was ignited by the sun and then kept burning until the closing of the Olympic Games.

The flame first appeared in the modern Olympics at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. The flame itself represents a number of things, including purity and the endeavor for perfection.
But what I was expecting did not happen ..... click here!


good night

until the Winter Youth Olympics in 2012 in Innsbruck, Austria 
and the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics in Nanjing, China.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lovely photos and a fascinating post. Thanks.

All the best, Boonie