​Thirty years later, Olympic swimming legend Janet Evans and Muhammad Ali’s widow Lonnie Ali remember the moment as if it happened only a few hours ago. Both of them, filled to this day, with the exhilarating jolt of trepidation and elation they felt that warm summer night in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium.During the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games, there was Evans, then 24, running purposefully up a steep ramp while carrying a flaming Olympic torch, understandably nervous because a couple billion people around the world, give or take a few million, were watching her run. “I am a swimmer,” she said. “I’m not a great runner.”And in a booth high above the stadium, there was Lonnie Ali, her mind racing with visions of everything good and bad that could happen in the next few minutes, knowing her husband, one of the most famous people on Earth, was going to have to light a fuse on a wire leading to the Olympic cauldron while holding a burning torch as his left hand shook from the tremors of Parkinson’s disease. Then she heard the gasp.More than 85,000 people in the stadium did not know what Evans and Lonnie Ali knew. They did not know that when Evans reached the platform below the cauldron, Muhammad Ali would suddenly emerge from the dark nighttime air into the glare of the stadium lights to join her so the flame she carried could ignite the torch he was holding.Sitting in the press tribune, I was one of the people who gasped. I’ll never forget that sound, thousands stunned at the same moment, inhaling as one, as if everyone could suck the air out of an outdoor stadium. Ali’s appearance to light the cauldron was one of the best-kept secrets in Olympic history. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more surprising and breathtaking moment in sports that didn’t happen on the field of play. As the Summer Games return to the United States for the first time since Atlanta — to Los Angeles in less than two years — Ali and Evans, who is now the LA28 chief athlete officer, have come together to again tell their story and promote the 2028 Olympic torch relay, which will begin in Atlanta, end in LA and visit all 50 states.Back in 1996, Evans, the winner of four Olympic gold medals and one silver in 1988 and 1992, was coming to Atlanta to compete at one more Olympics when Billy Payne, president and CEO of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, invited her to be the second-to-last person to hold the flame.”This is going to be the greatest moment of your Olympic career,” Payne told Evans, she said. “And I said, ‘Ah, yeah, oh, whatever, Billy, you know, what’s greater than winning an Olympic medal?”That was then. This is now. “He was right,” Evans said. “Running the flame was a big part of that, but then passing it to Muhammad, and that moment witnessing him, changed me. It changed how I view the Olympics. It changed how I approach a lot of things in my life. …“I tell people I’d give up every medal to do it aga