B.C. teen first to carry Olympic torch in 2010
By Jordana Huber, Canwest News Service
TORONTO - A British Columbia teenager has been selected as the first torchbearer for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Coca-Cola announced Monday.
Patricia Moreno, 18, of Vancouver will be the first of some 3,500 torchbearers to carry the flame along the 45,000-kilometre route, which begins in Victoria on Oct. 30.
The Britannia High School student, whose favourite school subject is physical education, is on the swim team and is planning to work as a lifeguard.
Moreno is also a member of her high school leadership program and after school wants to attend university to study kinetics and nutrition.
During the 106-day journey, the iconic torch for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games will travel to more than 1,000 communities, even reaching the very tip of Canada’s Far North - less than 900 kilometres from the North Pole.
After it is formally lit in Olympia, Greece, the flame is brought to Canada, sparking the relay in Victoria on Oct. 30, 2009. After four days on Vancouver Island, the torch will be taken to the Queen Charlotte Islands and Atlin in northern B.C. before heading into the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
In early November, it will land in North America’s easternmost tip, historic Cape Spear in St. John’s, N.L., before embarking on a cross-Canada journey that will put it back in B.C. on Jan. 21, 2010.
The torch will visit 266 communities in B.C., 73 in Alberta, and 39 in Saskatchewan. In Nunavut, the torch flies into the country’s newest and largest territory on Nov. 5, 2009 and will wend its way through four communities, three of them aboriginal.
The Olympic flame will arrive in Manitoba on Nov. 7, 2009 in the northern city of Thompson and visit 33 communities. Through Ontario, the torch will brighten 226 places.
In Eastern Canada, the torchbearers will run through 54 communities in Nova Scotia, including Windsor, which has long laid claim to being “the birthplace of hockey.” Fifty-eight towns and cities in New Brunswick will see the flame, 41 in Newfoundland and Labrador and 26 in Prince Edward Island.