Four flames lit on UK's highest peaks

LONDON (AFP) –

London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Chairman Sebastian Coe poses with the Welsh National Flame and the local scouts who kindled the flame on top of Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales on August 22 in this photo provided by LOCOG.

Four Paralympic flames were lit on the highest peaks of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland ahead of next week’s Games in London.

Disabled and able-bodied scouts scaled Scafell Pike in the Lake District in England, Snowdon in Wales, Scotland’s Ben Nevis and Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland.

The four flames will be brought together on Tuesday at Stoke Mandeville, the hospital in southern England which is the spiritual home of the Paralympics.

The teams used a ferrocerium rod which they struck against a rough steel surface to make sparks that created the flame.

Presentation of venues for London 2012 Paralympic Games

Sebastian Coe, the organiser of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, joined the trek up Snowdown.

“Great effort by the scouts this morning, starting at 6.15am to get to top of Snowdon. We lit one of 4 Paralympic flames,” he tweeted.

Elaine Paert, who has bipolar disorder, was the first person to carry the flame on Snowdon.

“I only found out on Tuesday that I would be the first person to carry it which was quite an incredible piece of information and I didn’t take it in,” she told the BBC.

“I was chosen as a representative of a group I am a member of as other people are not physically able to take part. It was absolutely incredible and amazing.

“I hope it will help people realise that people do have more to offer and that a disability needn’t set you back. I am looking forward to the Games even more now and I feel I have contributed a tiny atom towards it.”

The Paralympics are a near sellout, with spectators attracted by high-profile competitors including “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee sprinter who competed in the Olympics.

A record 4,200 athletes from 166 countries will take part and the Games will be watched by an estimated global television audience of four billion.