T he lighting of the Olympic cauldron on the River Seine on July 26 will mark the beginning of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and the end of a two-and-a-half-month torch relay designed to ignite ...

By the time it reaches Maracanã, the torch will have been in 27 Brazilian states, passed through some 500 towns and covered more than 12,400 miles on the ground.

But the first torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. , That year the torch was transported to seven countries over 12 days.