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Olympic Torch Relay to arrive in Sakhalin

On Friday, the Olympic Torch will travel to Vladivostok

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, November 14, 5:39 /ITAR-TASS/. The Olympic Torch Relay arrived from Russia’s Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula to the Island of Sakhalin on Thursday. The Olympic flame will be welcomed at the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk airport with a huge-fish-shaped cake, red caviar and ethnic music played by traditional Nivkh musical instruments, the press service of the Sakhalin regional administration said.

The relay will be kicked off from the Kristall ice palace. Its distance will be 12,225 kilometers. Fifty-seven torchbearers - renown athletes and public figures - will carry the torch through the streets of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. The relay will finish on Victory Square, where governor of the region Alexander Khoroshavin and torchbearer Oleg Saitov, the two-fold Olympic champion in boxing, will light the Olympic cauldron.

On Friday, the Olympic Torch will travel to Vladivostok.

The Olympic torch relay race kicked off in Moscow on October 7 and will end on the day of the opening ceremony of the Sochi-2014 Olympic Games on February 7.

It will last for 123 days and will run across the territories of 83 Russian regions. Fourteen thousand people will carry the Olympic torch through 2,900 populated localities. The torch, the symbol of the 2014 winter Olympic Games, will cover 65,000 kilometers, including on plane, by car, by train, in a Russian carriage harnessed by three horses (a Russian troika) and a reindeer sled. The Olympic torch has already reached the North Pole onboard of a nuclear ice-breaker, “The 50 Years of Victory,” and has made a space walk.