The Olympic torch relay is following an ambitious trail this year. Since 1936, the torch has been lit by the sun's rays in Olympia, then carried to the Games' host city -- in more recent years by plane, but also by car, ship and ferry. The torch then makes its way around the host nation, carried by the honored few: athletes, volunteers and lately corporate sponsors.

But this year, the torch has a round-the-world ticket, traveling over a 10-week period to sites of past Games and cities bidding for future Games on six continents. Stops include places such as Tokyo, Beijing, Sydney, Rome, Paris and London.

Last week, I was in Atlanta, site of the 1996 Olympics, traveling on the caravan with a group of a dozen torchbearers who ran along Peachtree Street, then headed into Centennial Park, which should be best remembered as a month-long home of celebration rather than the site of a tragic hour. In the park, Olympic champions Rulon Gardner (wrestling) and Vonetta Flowers (bobsled) carried the torch in separate legs to its destination. Mostly, I'll remember the stories on the caravan.

As the torchbearers filed in, they developed an instant kinship, each asking what the other was thinking and feeling and offering enthusiastic support for the people next to them who understood their butterflies.

"Who do you have meeting you?"

"Keep it away from your body."

"Don't stare at the flame."

"Keep it away from your face."

"Are you buying your torch?"

"I didn't sleep at all. Did you?"

"I'm loosing [or losing??] my knees."

As the torchbearers sat on the bus, holding their torches and waiting for their numbers to be called, I started speaking to them.

Rick Orchard ran a safe house for at-risk youth. He had carried the torch in 1996 before the Atlanta Games, but he had lost it -- and most of his belongings -- during a house fire in December. "Need to keep this one safe," he said.

Victor Mbaba came to the States from his native Nigeria in 1984 and later started the African Children's Fund, an organization that supports after-school and housing programs in Atlanta and provides HIV counseling and schooling to children in West Africa. He had received awards from Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, but this, he said, was "the highlight of my life's journey."

Nate Kinion, a volunteer with the Boy Scouts for 38 years, told me the relay was "creating a brotherhood for everyone who sees it. America's youth need Olympic heroes."

Randy Holmes told me about his dedication to the Games. He'd been a volunteer at five Olympics and various Olympic-related events. He volunteered as a driver, museum archivist and t-shirt salesman. He sewed part of an American flag the size of a football field for the Atlanta organizing committee in 1996. That summer, his parents played host family to a young fellow volunteer named Tara Nott. Holmes helped find her a job with the committee and the experience inspired her to take up weightlifting. She became the country's first female Olympic weightlifting champion four years later in Sydney.

But of all his tasks, the one that stood out to Holmes was his stint as a medical guinea pig at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. With electrodes hooked up to him from all angles, Holmes would get on a bike that would ride automatically, testing his biomechanical stamina until he passed out.

"After I collapsed, they'd pull muscle fibers out through my legs and take blood samples through the IVs in my arms," he said, with great pride. Now this was a deserving torchbearer.

Joe Jacobi was the Olympian on the bus. He had won a gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Games in two-man whitewater canoe slalom and had qualified to compete in Athens at age 34. "The torch relay is the humanitarian and most humbling part of the Olympics," he said. "It's much more humbling than being in or winning the Olympics. To see the flame straight from Athens and to see people and communities respond to it, that's what they mean when they say Olympic spirit. The World Series doesn't do that. Not the Super Bowl. Just the Olympics."

Jacobi told us how he had planned to retire after the world championships that were supposed to be held on the Ocoee River in Tennessee in September 2001. The championships were canceled after the events of Sept. 11. "So my new goal was to get to another Olympics," Jacobi said. Last month, he and partner Matt Taylor qualified for the U.S. team.

It was at this point that some strange worlds began to collide. Holmes mentioned to Jacobi that he had been best friends with Taylor, of all people, back at the Sara Smith Elementary School in Atlanta. "And what are the odds of that?" Jacobi asked.

Holmes mentioned that his own fascination with the Games was kindled in 1984, when he watched the torch pass through Atlanta on its way to Los Angeles. "It was on the corner of Wieuca Road and Yuaka," he said. "I snapped a picture of the guy running with it and that sort of changed my life. I still have the picture."

As Holmes was talking, Kinion started tugging at my arm with a look of sheer amazement on his face. "Wieuca and Yuaka," he interjected. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," Holmes said. "I remember it like it was yesterday. Why?"

"Well," Kinion explained. "I was the one carrying that torch. May 31st, 1984."

"That was you?" Holmes said. "You have to be kidding!" And what are the odds of that?

As the vehicle finally emptied, I got out to follow Rulon Gardner as he carried the torch into Centennial Park and handed it off to Flowers. "This is America," Gardner said, as he waited for the torch to arrive. "This is really cool."

I saw then how Gardner outlasted most of his foes on the mat. Torch in hand, he maintained a brisk pace, high-fiving supporters along the route who held up banners, took out cameras and, in some cases, started singing. One of the high-fivers was Bart Conner, the double gold medalist in gymnastics from 1984 who was in town to broadcast the Titan Games. "My wife [Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci] is going to carry this in New York tomorrow," he told me, "and I have to miss it."

"Do you have any function with the torch here," I asked. "Did they ask you to carry it?"

"No," he told me, "but I wasn't going to miss it. Really I just had to come out and see it. You know, this never gets old. It still gives you chills."

Sports Illustrated staff writer Brian Cazeneuve covers Olympic sports for the magazine and is a regular contributor to SI.com.