"We keep the mother flame in specially designed miners' lanterns so if the flame does go out for some reason on the relay we relight it from the source of the flame."
That's mighty unsporting.
Should make it a global game of paintball capture the flag, two countries who want to host the Olympic games are the team captains and their countries build the bases which hold two lit torches. Each captain country gets to pick other countries to join their teams. Once started each team has to get the enemies torch and bring it back to their base, the winner gets to host the Olympics.
Everyone can take part, everyone gets paint ball based weaponry along with protective gear. Apart from any other weaponry you can use whatever you want (within the constraints of the law of course, as in if you had a boat you could mount a amphibious assault but you couldn't steal a car that isn't yours). Starts at the end of every Olympic games, would probably take a few years at least for someone to win.