Muhammad Ali Surprised World at '96 Olympic Games

ATLANTA, GA — For each Olympic Games, the long journey of the Olympic torch is a highlight and represents the start of each games.

More than a decade after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, boxing legend Muhammad Ali surprised the world as the flame was passed to his torch and he lit the cauldron at the 1996 games in Atlanta.

Muhammad Ali died on Friday. He was 74.

Highlighted as one of the great moments in U.S. Olympics history, the event was included in the 2012 "Gold Medal Moments" series by Team USA.

"The way they orchestrated it was that no one knew, that I knew of," Dr. Bill Mallon, an Olympic Historian, told producers. "And he sort of popped out from behind almost a magic curtain. Here was our greatest sporting hero, in my opinion, lighting the flame."

Olympic swimmer Janet Evans had the honor of passing the torch to Ali at the opening of the '96 games. She said last year that she would give up her five Olympic medals to relive the moment.

"And I ran up that track, and I ran up those three big, long stairways. And I got to the top, and there stood Muhammad Ali," Evans told the crowd at the 2015 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards. "And my moment with him was brief; you saw how quickly he lit that flame.

"But that moment for me, standing there, watching this man, with his courage and his determination, and being brought into the Olympic fold once again, 36 years after his gold medal in 1960," she said. "And to stand there in front of the world and inspire even more young people like myself, to be and do and accomplish anything we want to do, it was an epiphany for me. It was a defining moment in my Olympic career."

NBC exec Dick Ebersol reportedly had to lobby for Ali's inclusion in that iconic moment, he told Sporting Business Journal in 2015. In the interview, Ebersol recalled the conversation he had with '96 Olympics organizer Billy Payne.

"I don’t think there’s any question about it," he reportedly told Payne. "It should be Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali may be, outside of perhaps the Pope, the most beloved figure in the world. In the third world, he’s a hero. In the Muslim world, he’s a hero and a fellow traveler. To anybody young — just about — in the United States, he’s a man of great moral principle who was willing to go to prison… He was willing to stand on his principles.”