Who are the men in blue?

They wear bright blue tracksuits and Beijing Olympic organizers call them "flame attendants."

But a military bearing hints at their true pedigree: paramilitary police sent by Beijing to guard the Olympic flame during its journey around the world.

Torchbearers have criticized the security detail for aggressive behaviour, and a top London Olympics official simply called them "thugs." "They were barking orders at me, like 'Run! Stop! This! That!' and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, who are these people?"' former television host Konnie Huq told British Broadcasting Corp. radio about her encounter with the men in blue during London's leg of the relay Sunday.

Officially, Beijing has said only that the unit's mission was to guard the flame, in keeping with practices of past Olympic games. Members were picked from special police units of the People's Armed Police, China's internal security force. The requirements for the job: to be "tall, handsome, mighty, in exceptional physical condition similar to that of professional athletes," the state-run China News Service said.

Special police units are the top tier of the paramilitary corps, chosen for skills in martial arts, marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat, according to sinodefense.com, a British-based website specializing in Chinese military affairs. The training for the Olympic flame detail included daily mountain runs of at least 10 kilometres and lessons in protocol. They also learned basic commands such as "go," "step back," "speed up" and "slow down" in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, the China News Service said. But as the torch made a stormy procession through London and Paris, the military training rather than the protocol seemed to come to the fore.

At least one torchbearer said she clashed with the squad, and others have criticized their heavy-handed tactics.Yolaine De La Bigne, a French environmental journalist who was a torchbearer in Paris, told The Associated Press she tried to wear a headband with a Tibetan flag, but the Chinese agents ripped it away from her. "It was seen and then, after four seconds, all the Chinese security pounced on me. There were at least five or six (of them). They started to get angry" and shouted "No! No! No!" in English, she said.De La Bigne tried to push several agents away as they grabbed her arm. She said two French athletes who are martial arts experts tried to help her and clashed briefly with the security detail.

The chairman of the London 2012 Games, Sebastian Coe, was even more blunt."They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible. They did not speak English. They were thugs," Coe, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was quoted as saying in British media. A spokeswoman for the London 2012 Olympics committee confirmed that Coe was quoted accurately, but added that he thought he was making private comments.The Olympic flame wasn't part of the ancient games, and the torch relay didn't become a fixture in the modern Olympics until the 1936 Berlin Games, when it was part of the Nazi pageantry that promoted Hitler's beliefs of Aryan supremacy in the world of sports.

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