In Greece 776 B.C., a Pan-Hellenic festival consisting of athletic games and contests of choral poetry and dance, commenced. A sacred flame was used to begin the games and was kept burning throughout the celebration of the ancient Olympics. Historians believe this Olympic flame was first created in a temple erected by the ancient Greeks to honor the powerful queen of the mythological gods, Hera. Others remind us the Olympic torch commemorates the theft of fire by Prometheus from the Greek god Zeus. Today, however, we may be getting quite a different message.

The Olympic flame was reintroduced at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, and it has been part of the modern Olympic Games ever since. (Although, the modern torch relay of the games apparently has no ancient precedent.) From 1976 to 2004, the Olympic torch has died-out about six times, but with this year’s relay, officials have lost count on the number of times the torch has gone out.

What makes the disappearing flame of the Beijing Olympic torch so odd is that it was specially designed with cutting-edge space technology to automatically re-light if it was accidentally extinguished with an internal ignition device. It was supposed to be able to withstand gale-force winds and other severe weather conditions and yet China’s torch was strangely extinguished nonetheless. Supposedly, many Chinese people have started to view this as a bad omen.

Surprisingly, the behind-the-scenes incidents of my article Beijing Olympics- Not Always As It Seems does not even begin to reveal the entirety of the bizarre occurrences behind this year’s Olympics since the relay began. For instance, the worst fire Greece has seen in decades just happened to destroy the location for the lighting ceremony for the Olympic torch. This was followed by several torch lighting rehearsal failures, many large protests have and continue to occur and the flame was extinguished many times. Then, for various reasons, some apparently incomprehensible, the torch flame died out for runners in Australia, Japan and Thailand.

For the entire journey of the torch through 113 cities, the die outs never stopped. Could Zeus be trying to tell us something? Could it symbolize an end of the Communist regime in China? Or could it be a global message of things many of us may not wish to know? The message, if any, remains uncertain. However, what is certain is the incidents have occurred and continue to occur at the time of this writing. This year’s Beijing Olympiad may be truly memorable indeed.