The Russian Olympic Federation has announced the route – and some of the highlights – of the Olympic Torch ahead of the Sochi Games as it makes a four month tour of the world's largest country, departing on October 7th and arriving in Sochi at the start of the Games on February 7th, 2014.
Along the 65,000km route through more than 8 Russian provinces the torch is set to blast in to space via the International Space station (sadly, for health and safety reasons, the torch only, not the Olympic flame!) and make its first ever space walk outside the space station (It has been up in to space before ahead of the Atlanta and Sydney summer Games).
"Nobody has done this before. The spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the Sochi 2014 Olympic torch will be an historic moment in the history of the Olympic Torch Relay. I want to thank the Federal Space Agency for its support which will enable us to take the Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch Relay to the final frontier," said The President of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko.
It is also planned that the torch will make it to the bottom of Lake Baikal, the world's deepest at 1637m and travel to the north pole aboard the victory ice breaker.
The Olympic Torch Relay, Russia's first since the Moscow summer games in 1980, back in the Soviet era, is sponsored by Coca-Cola which has worked with the Olympics since 1928 and now has a $3bn business in Russia.