SYDNEY, April 18: The arrival of the troubled Olympic torch relay in Australia next week will revive memories of a 1956 stunt in which a hoax runner fooled crowds with a homemade torch topped by flaming pants.

Barry Larkin, then a university student, carried a wooden chair leg crowned with a blazing metal pudding container which held the remains of the pants, up the steps of Sydney’s Town Hall and delivered it to city mayor Pat Hills.

The mayor, sensing nothing wrong as tens of thousands of people cheered the runner, took the torch and gave the first part of his prepared speech before becoming aware of the prank.

Larkin, now a Sydney-based veterinarian in his 70s, said on Friday the initial response to the gag was harsh, but as the Melbourne Games drew nearer, people began to see the humour of the situation.

“The first couple of days some of the nasty people got on,” he said.

“And then people stepped back and thought, ‘Really, there was no harm’.” Larkin refused to comment on the controversy surrounding this year’s Beijing torch relay, saying it was too political.

But in a British newspaper article in 2004, he explained that the hoax idea had sprung up after he and a group of friends felt “too much was being made of this Olympic torch business”.

“It was being treated as a god, whereas in fact it was originally invented by the Nazis for the Berlin Games in 1936,” he told The Independent on Sunday.

Larkin’s group, which had a fake motorcycle escort, took the torch into the crowd and lit it and initially everyone saw it as a joke.

But after Larkin began to run the route the crowd closed in around him and he found himself with a genuine police escort.

“If people want to write a story, I’ve never objected to that,” he said. “I’ve always let it be known that I was the guy.”

But, after receiving many phone calls from journalists around the world in recent days as the torch makes its troubled way to Beijing, he’s reluctant to say more.

“After 52 years, it’s run its course.”

The torch arrives in Australia on Wednesday for its one-day outing in Canberra.—AFP