Dedicated Windsor nurse collects the torch in Maidenhead

Richard Cutcher • Published 10 Jul 2012 11:12 1 Comment

THAMES Hospicecare nurse Adam Chojnacki, 32, from Windsor has collected the Olympic Flame at the first Torchbearer changeover in Maidenhead.

The torch arrived at Furze Platt Road at 10.48am and Mr Chojnacki, who cared for his terminally-ill partner Matthew Watson for a year, took on the carrying duties at the Gardner road and A308 cookham road junction.

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  JUDGE1066
  276 posts
  Jul 12, 18:24
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  Look at it as keeping the moderator in a job, trying to get another one with their unbiased views and their ability to embrace free speech things could get ricky if the advertising dries up, sleepwalkers tend to get their just deserts.
  
  Just Saying for all the flag waving people who say.......once in a lifetime experience, learn some history :-)
  
  FACT!
  
  The Olympic flame, lit last week in Greece, arrives in Great Britain tomorrow before embarking on a 70-day, 8,000-mile relay around the British Isles that will culminate in the lighting of the Olympic cauldron in London on July 27. While the Olympic torch relay evokes the spirit of ancient Greece, it was first concocted by a regime not known for the Olympic ideals of international peace and goodwill: Nazi Germany.
  
  While the pageantry appeared to reprise a sacred ancient Greek tradition, the Olympic torch relay was actually a piece of modern political theater carefully scripted and paid for entirely by Nazi Germany. The Greeks employed a ritual fire in the ancient Olympics, but they never staged a relay of torchbearers to open their games. The Olympic torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the chief organizer of the Berlin Games, who envisioned an unprecedented succession of more than 3,000 runners transporting the flame from the cradle of the ancient Olympics to Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where it would light the cauldron during the opening ceremonies of the XI Olympiad.
  
  Diem had been instrumental in getting the International Olympic Committee to award the Summer Games to Berlin in 1931, but their future was very much in doubt when Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933. Hitler was contemptuous of the modern Olympic movement, which he once dismissed as “an invention of Jews and Freemasons,” but propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels convinced the Führer that the Summer Games would be an international stage for showcasing Nazi Germany—and the torch relay would be its stirring opening act. Hitler admired the ancient Greeks and saw the Nazis as their rightful heirs. While Diem was not a member of the Nazi Party, his torch relay would be coopted by the Nazis as a powerful propaganda tool to bind not only the ancient and modern Olympics, but ancient Greece and the Third Reich as well.
  
  The entire torch relay, starting with the ceremony in Olympia, was a thoroughly German production. Krupp, a German arms manufacturer, crafted the steel-clad torches that featured a magnesium-burning element designed by German chemists to stay lit regardless of weather conditions. Germany’s Zeiss Optics built the mirror used to light the flame, and an Opel car carrying a spare Olympic flame trailed the torchbearers. Goebbels ensured there was extensive German media coverage of the relay, including radio reports directly from the route, and he commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to film it as part of “Olympia,” the Nazi propaganda film released in 1938.
  
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