Yelena Isinbayeva excited to be Sochi torchbearer

Yelena Isanbayeva

Moscow, July 24 (IANS) Russian pole vault star Yelena Isinbayeva said she was proud to be a torchbearer of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

“It’s really cool to be a torchbearer, to touch the Winter Games, because this is something different from the Summer Olympics,” Xinhua quoted Isinbayeva as saying on Wednesday.

“It will be lovely just to be there,” said the Athens and Beijing Olympic champion, who has also been appointed the mayoress of the coastal athletes’ village.

The 31-year-old veteran will retire after the next month’s World Athletics Championships in Moscow, and later she will act as an ambassador for Russian sport in the country’s first-ever Winter Olympics in February.

Russia’s torch relay is set to travel a record 65,000 km through all 83 regions with 14,000 carriers.

After arriving from Greece in October, the flame will commence its tour on Oct 7 in Moscow. It will head east and loop around the Kamchatka Peninsula, down to Vladivostok and back across southern Siberia via Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake.

The torch will go back into European Russia after making its way through more than 2,900 towns and cities, eventually settling down at the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the opening ceremony on Feb 7, 2014.