Only weather has previously succeeded in snuffing out the Olympic flame, just twice in its history. Today French officials managed it three times.

According to Olympic legend, the flame is ignited by the sun’s rays on the ancient site of Olympia in Greece. Hundreds of sportsmen and politicians then pass a torch carrying the symbolic flame across the world before lighting a cauldron in the host stadium.

“The Olympic flame represents the positive values that Man has always associated with fire,” the International Olympic Committee grandly boasts. “[It] transmits a message of peace and friendship amongst peoples.”

Today that flame was extinguished for “technical reasons”. Its minders were forced to retreat into a bus as protesters, angry at China’s human rights record, swarmed around the totem, which is en route to Beijing.

In 2004 a gust of wind blew out the flame in the build up to the Athens Games. It was relit from back-up lanterns also carried from Olympia, which accompany the torch on its journey to the host city.

In Montreal in 1976 a torrential rainstorm descended on the Canadian city a few days after the opening ceremony and the flame was doused. An enterprising, if badly advised local official whipped out his cigarette lighter to renew the flames.

Horrified IOC representatives quickly put that flame out and re-lit it with the “pure” standby lanterns.

The flame has travelled on Concorde, a Native American canoe and a camel. Before Sydney 2000, divers even swam past the Great Barrier Reef with a scientifically advanced waterproof version.

Keeping the torch lit on its various travels is the responsibility of around 10 “flame attendants” who accompany the fire 24 hours a day.

Behind closed doors they are allowed to temporarily put out the propane torch as long as the back-up lanterns are kept burning. Those lanterns stay in a single hotel room each night with three guards, one of whom must be awake at all times.

The torch relay is a celebration of the ancient fires that burnt through the original Olympiads but the idea of carrying the flame from Olympia to the host city each year was invented by the organisers of the 1936 Berlin Games.

The relay, captured in Leni Riefenstahl's film, "Olympia", was part of the Nazi propaganda machine’s attempt to add myth and mystique to Adolf Hitler’s regime.

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.

Despite its dubious origins the relay has become one of the most significant symbols of the Olympics. Torch carriers have included Michel Platini, a French footballer, Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and this year Gordon Brown.

The current tour will visit 135 cities in 20 countries, covering 137,000km in 130 days. It will be kept burning until the closing ceremony of the Games in Beijing in August.

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