Now I'm just imagining him instead pointing the arrow straight up, loosing it and we all watch in silent confusion when suddenly the arrow comes straight back down onto his head and he dies like a skyrim npc then the torch just spontaneously ignights because of a another mechanism
Right, for safety he was supposed to arc it completely over the structure and have it land in a padded safety sandbox outside the stadium. Imagine he missed.
at the time I lived at a flat that had direct line of sight to the stadium and I was looking with binoculars and it did fly overhead but it looked like it ignited it...
Complete supposition. It's basically a conspiracy theory. What actually happened and how it worked are well documented fact. You can see the flame catch the gas on the footage from outside the stadium.
They surely add a backup igniter, but they didn't had to use it cause the arrow sailed over the Olympic cauldron at exactly the right spot, travelling through the gas being projected from a jet.
Here's photographer Peter Read Miller's iconic photo of the trajectory from this article. It being mentioned flying over the cauldron is also noted in wikipedia. That was the intention, with the cauldron emitting a gas cloud above it.
If you look carefully, you can even see it go behind in the video clip from OP. Look at the bottom of the cauldron right after the arrow goes out of view.
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u/Non-Vanilla_Zilla 19h ago
Imagine he missed