King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The Olympic torch speaks: A rare phone interview from a secret hideout in Australia. Plus: Flapless batting helmet renaissance.

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April 24, 2008 | After two weeks of cashing in favors with various contacts in the worlds of international table tennis and Australian-rules football, this column was able to land an exclusive interview with the Olympic Torch Wednesday as it prepared for the Australia leg of its world tour.

The torch has been beset at several locations around the world by demonstrators protesting China's human-rights record and its actions in Tibet, Burma and the Sudan. Beijing Olympics officials have repeatedly changed the route of the relay and kept the torch hidden to avoid the embarrassment of having it extinguished or otherwise interfered with by protesters.

We spoke by telephone.

How's it been going since I last saw you, in San Francisco?

It's hot, man, hot. San Fran was weird, crazy, ugly. But then things were OK for a while. Argentina, Tanzania, Oman. Nice and quiet. Pakistan and India, they kept me away from everybody.

Where are you now?

I'm not sure. It's getting where you can't keep track. I think, maybe Malaysia?

No, you're in Australia, but I mean, where do they have you right now?

Oh, right. If it's Wednesday this must be Australia. They won't tell me what this place is. It's dark in here, for one thing, except for, you know, me. I'm in some kind of storage room. I think it's an embassy. Or a Starbucks.

How do you feel about all the protests that have greeted you around the world?

It's like, I'm not sure what I'm doing, you know? I'm supposed to be there for the people to see me, and they keep locking me down, whipping me over to the other side of town, running me around a track inside an arena instead of out in the streets where all the people are.

I mean, we all have our thing we do, you know what I'm saying? You do, uh, whatever it is you do, I'm an eternal flame. Well, I'm not eternal. There's like an official eternal source flame thing, which frankly is pretty full of itself and I've had just about enough of traveling with that dude. "Oh, I'm the real eternal flame, you're just a proxy." Put some asbestos on it, pal. I'm just trying to get through this tour.

Next page: Timider! Hiddener! Pointlesser! Plus: The return of the flapless batting helmet