The New York Times has an interactive feature on the design of Olympic torches from the 1936 Berlin Olympics to this summer's Beijing Olympics. There were some strange ones -- like Mexico City's 1968 Summer Games' short whisk-shaped torch and Albertville's 1992 Winter Games' torch designed by Phillipe Starck.
My least favorite is the Sidney 2000 Summer torch and my favorite is the Pininfarina-designed Turin Winter torch, seen above next to the current torch.
Pininfarina started in Turin in 1930, founded by Battista “Pinin” Farina as a small-production coachbuilder for the emerging auto industry. Pininfarina is probably best known for its Italian designs -- Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Maseratis -- but since its founding, the company has designed for almost every major car company on the planet, including Cadillac, Ford, Honda, and Volvo.
The company designs other things too -- luggage, toothbrushes, wine bottles, espresso machines -- everything.
Pininfarina's description for the Honda Argento Vivo (below), a concept produced for the 1995 Tokyo Auto Show, reads like Italian translated to Japanese translated to English:
Emotional two-seater convertible, realised on Honda high technological mechanicals, which adopts sophisticated solutions in terms of aluminium space frame, rear wheel drive and fuely retractable hard top moved by a system of electric motors and hydraulic actuators. Technology combines with the warmth and the fascination of the interior, originating a sporty but, at the same time, romantic car.
The firm works better with its Italian compatriots. Pininfarina has designed almost every notable Ferrari: the 365 GTB/4 “Daytona” in 1968, the Dino the year after, the Berlinetta Boxer in 1971, the Testrossa in 1984, and the F40 in 1987.
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