MOSCOW, June 24 (R-Sport) – The torch carrying the Olympic flame will make an interstellar pit stop at the International Space Station as part of the Sochi 2014 torch relay, Russian Olympic officials confirmed on Monday.
While details remain sparse on the ambitious plan, which was first proposed in 2011, Sochi chief organizer Dmitry Chernyshenko and Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, have signed an agreement ensuring the torch will travel to the ISS and embark on a spacewalk while on board the research satellite.
A trip to space means the torch will take the unusual step of leaving Russia even before takeoff, as the country's manned space program is based in central Kazakhstan at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazan will accompany the torch, which will remain unlit on board the ISS because of safety regulations, in a Soviet-designed Soyuz spacecraft.
After the flame arrives from Greece in October, it begins a 123-day, 65,000-kilometer odyssey in Moscow, spiraling out from the capital before heading east and looping around the Kamchatka Peninsula, down to Vladivostok and back across southern Siberia via Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake.
On its way through more than 2,900 towns in Russia’s 83 regions, the torch will make its way back into European Russia, eventually winding down to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the Opening Ceremony on February 7, 2014.
More than 14,000 torchbearers and 30,000 volunteers will be involved in the journey as the torch travels by foot, car, train, plane and troika, a traditional Russian sleigh.
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