The Olympic torch that burnt in downtown Rio was lit by Jorge Gomes and literally cast light on these concerns as the following article explains. CBC News writes in the article a Beautiful Life, “Jorge was abandoned at birth. He spent much of his early life in a homeless shelter in a favela called Mangueira. He doesn’t remember much, aside from the hunger, he says. “We would only eat breakfast, that’s it, and we had to sleep on the floor.” Jorge was adopted three times and each time given back to the shelter, until Ana Lourenco and her husband adopted him in 2000. In the early days of this process, Ana had to do a lot of reaching out, especially when he used to fight with her other kids and then run away.  Ana knew Jorge liked running and was good at it, so she took him to train at a sports centre called Vila Olimpica. It’s a government-run program to give promising athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance to get some elite track training and to escape the streets. “By putting centers like this in needy areas, then you can keep kids away from the drug trade,” says Jorge’s track coach Edileuza Medeiros. In August, two days before the Olympics, Medeiros called Ana to ask her if her son Jorge would be interested in lighting the Olympic cauldron in downtown Rio. Medieros said the organizers were looking for a runner … a success story who represents Brazil…But before he lit the torch, his parents had told him why the flame was to be displayed where it was, in front of a stunning church with a dark history. “In 1993, there was a group of street kids who used to sleep here, and they were murdered by police officers and civilians in the payment of local businessmen,” says Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at Rio State University. “It was a brutal mass-killing even for the brutal standards of Rio at that time when the city was much more violent than it is today. Santoro walks across the street from the church and points at the tiled sidewalk. On it is painted a row of eight small figures that look like children fallen to the ground. “Many of them were killed on this sidewalk here,” Santoro says. “So you have the paintings here in red to remember. It’s a kind of memorial to what happened on that terrible night.” When Jorge learned about the Candelaria massacre‚ it hit home. Most of the victims were his age. “It could have been me,” he says, “and that’s why I lit the flame there, to change the story” ⁽¹¹⁾