To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We chose 50 of them to re-live, one a day, before new memories are made in Paris. Scroll on for today’s memory.
It was just past midnight during the opening ceremony of the Atlanta 1996 Olympics when the greatest boxer the world has ever seen, Muhammad Ali, emerged on a faintly glowing stage.
Trembling with Parkinson’s Disease, the American heavyweight legend shuffled out from the dark with the Olympic torch. He met Janet Evans, the four-time Olympic swimming gold medallist from the United States. Evans, carrying the Olympic flame, lit the torch shaking in Ali’s hands. Fifty-two at the time, the man known and adored globally as “The Greatest” then held the torch aloft inside the Centennial Olympic Stadium, as it was known at the time, before setting the cauldron alight.
Watch the video at the top of the page to see Muhammad Ali light the Olympic flame at Atlanta 1996!
“I think everybody in the Olympic movement still has this image of Muhammad Ali, when he was already suffering from the beginning of his Parkinson’s Disease, standing there in those very touching moments, proudly holding the Olympic torch and then lighting the flame,” said International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach in 2020.
It’s among the most iconic moments in Olympic history.
In one regard, it was a moment for the world to honour a sporting legend. At the Rome 1960 Olympics, 18 and going by his original name of Cassius Clay, he defeated Zbigniew Pietrzykowski of Poland to win the light-heavyweight gold medal. Over the remainder of his career he won three world heavyweight titles and successfully defended his crown on 19 occasions. With his blinding hand speed and cat-like footwork, he would “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”.
In another regard, his lighting of the flame was a stirring reminder of the harsh reality of mortality and, indeed, the cruel nature of neurological disease. One of the most phenomenal athletes the world has ever seen was in the most gruelling fight of his life, and the fight was playing out in front of millions worldwide.
“Putting the old rascal-prophet on the official pedestal raised the tempo of these 17 days,” wrote legendary American sports writer George Vecsey in The New York Times at the time.
“Indeed, let the Games begin.”
Aged 74 in 2016, after a three-decade battle with Parkinson’s Disease that had robbed Ali of his verbal elegance and physical prowess, the world bade farewell to “The Greatest”.