Flame Relay Research Articles

‘The Day the Flame Came to Town’: The Olympic Flame, Symbol, Community and Commodification

Debates regarding the Olympic Flame Relay oscillate between questions concerning the symbolic value of the Relay and the commodified nature of the Games more generally. While some argue for the potential intercultural understanding that the Flame Relay fosters, others point to the extent to which Olympism is embedded within the practices of commercial companies. Research thus tends to use either ethnographic accounts or media analysis—the former being seen by some as authentic and the latter viewed as capable of capturing the commodified context of such consumption. Attention is given here to its visit to one town and how people experienced the Relay themselves, against its (re)construction in local and national mediated accounts. Data were collected from interviews with those watching the Flame Relay, extensive photographic records, fieldwork observations, and local media coverage of the event. The ritual itself appeared temporary, superficial and contoured by the major sponsors of the Relay. While the Flame had some local significance, claims made for its broader symbolic value appeared muted—people knew less about Olympism and were less moved by its symbolism.

Struggling to celebrate: management of the 2004 Olympic Flame Relay segment in Greece

This article offers a first-hand account of the experiences of an advance manager of the flame relay team of the Athens Olympic Games Organizing Committee (ATHOC). It covers the first and third segments of this relay within Greece and offers a focused description of the standard celebration events that punctuated the passage of the Olympic Flame. Organizational and managerial successes and failures shape the public experience of the Olympic Flame Relay (OFR), and the celebrations join the local and the global into performances of special demographic and symbolic power. In the model adopted for the 2004 OFR, these celebrations offered particular targets of attention for the various stakeholders (ATHOC departments, commercial sponsors, national government cultural officials, local authorities, and police). Power struggles among the various stakeholders are analysed, and the tactics deployed by sponsors to win these struggles are particularly revealed in a case study of the battle over the relay anthem. This article provides a rare published account of the experience of being a flame relay staff organizer under the emergent ‘world's best practices’ model.

Hybridity and subversion: the Olympic flame in India

This article presents the results of a field study of the 2008 Olympic Flame Relay in Delhi, India, where Tibetan and pro-Tibetan protests against the Chinese Olympic hosts generated a state security transformation of Olympic ritual and a parallel Tibetan counter-performance. These events are placed in the context of earlier Indian practices of indigenization of the Olympic Flame Relay in 1960, 1964, and 2004. If Delhi 2004 represented a further hybridization of indigenous and international ‘best practices’ models for flame relays, Delhi 2008 demonstrated the failure of the standard model to cope with the political and moral forces unleashed when the host nation is as challenged as China in the field of human rights. This article concludes with an analysis of the Queen's Baton Relay for the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, showing the chaotic caricature that results when transnational standard practices for relays of sports festival icons are completely set aside.

The 2004 International Relay: a Greek around the world with the Olympic Flame

This paper presents a first-hand experience of the 2004 Athens International Olympic Flame Relay (IOFR) from the perspective of one of the Greek team members who accompanied the flame. It provides a rich description of the mechanics of the relay itself, demonstrating that it involved complex international exchanges. It is about much more than the torchbearers. The author describes life on the road with the flame, highlighting the cultural, political, and personal challenges entailed in this endeavour. It explores the tensions: between sponsor interests and the spirit of Olympism; from professional ‘world's best practices’ implementation of the relay to volunteers' expectations of their roles and experiences; and in the division of labour between the International Olympic Committee (IOC), National Olympic Committees (NOCs), and Olympic Games Organizing Committees (OCOGs) as stakeholders.

‘My programme became very strict’: a conversation with Athanassios Kritsinelis

Athanassios (Nassos) Kritsinelis is known and respected across the world as the dean of Olympic Flame Relay (OFR) practice. As OFR technical director and manager, first for the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) and then for the 2004 Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC), he has for over 30 years been the most notable on-the-ground guardian and innovator of Greek OFR traditions, as well as the chief Greek interlocutor with the succession of Olympic Games Organizing Committees (OCOGs) receiving the flame. Kritsinelis was the main ATHOC planner for the Athens 2004 relay. He was also a tragic casualty when the transnational, ‘world's best practices’ operational regime that had evolved out of prior, largely Anglo-Saxon OFRs was brought to bear in Athens.

Olympic Flame Relay operations under a ‘world's best practices’ regime: a conversation with Steven McCarthy

Steven McCarthy is founder, Chairman and CEO of Além International Management Inc., today's leading transnational provider of operational services for the Olympic Flame Relay (OFR). As operations manager for the 1996 Atlanta relay, managing director of the 2002 Salt Lake City relay, and operations manager of the international segment of the 2004 Athens relay, as well as the author of the IOC's official OFR technical manual, McCarthy has played the leading role in innovating key aspects and codifying the whole of today's ‘world's best practices’ model of OFR production. In this article, he discusses the origins of transnational OFR operations companies, the core ritual responsibilities of relay supervisors, security and safety issues, negotiation strategies with local authorities, and collaboration and conflicts among commercial sponsors, organizing committees, and operations personnel. A persistent theme in the conversation is just how universal or ethnocentric any world's best practices model turns out to be, and what the future role of the central IOC administration should be in protecting and replenishing the symbolic and moral capital of the OFR and through it the Olympic Movement. This conversation between the OFR's leading ethnographer and its leading transnational manager provides an unprecedented backstage view of one of the world's most important rituals, discussing dramatic issues and episodes equally unknown to Olympic publics and authorities.

Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form

This article introduces and contextualizes an anthropological study of the Olympic Flame Relay across 25 years, from Los Angeles 1984 through the aftermath of Beijing, punctuated by the announcement by the International Olympic Committee Executive Board in March 2009, that there would be no more global relays. This extended ethnological research offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and transcultural ritual form. It also further exposes the managerial revolution, with its characteristic language of ‘world's best practice,’ that has succeeded the commercial revolution in international Olympic affairs. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory, demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. Finally, this extended case study offers a further development of the author's theoretical work on complex cultural performance systems, in particular the dialectic between the performative genres of ritual and spectacle that indexes the wider Olympic Movement's struggle to preserve itself from the successes of the Olympic sports industry.

This flame, our eyes: Greek/American/IOC relations, 1984–2002, an ethnographic memoir

This article presents an ethnographically based analysis of Olympic flame relay (OFR) relations among the Hellenic Olympic authorities and the Greek public sphere, three American Olympic organizing committees (Los Angeles 1984, Atlanta 1996, and Salt Lake City 2002), and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) across a 20-year period. It provides the first scholarly analysis of the controversies created by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee that nearly led to violence at Ancient Olympia during the flame-lighting ceremonies for those games. It explains how the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games managed to overcome this poisonous history through intensive intercultural diplomacy and to secure an Olympic flame for Atlanta. The structures and events analysed herein transformed the OFR in a variety of ways – from the IOC's attempts to increase its ownership stake in the ritual, to increased corporate sponsor interest in it, to the OFR's emergence as a potential weapon of international political protest – setting the stage for OFR struggles to come in the early years of this century.

‘Civilised Games’?: Beijing 2008, power politics, and cultural struggles

This paper, first published in 2005, examines the tensions and key groups involved in the cultural struggles that underpinned the awarding of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. In doing so, attention is drawn to broader questions concerning global sport and Olympism, globalization and geopolitical issues, and Sino-Western civilizational struggles. The impact on global sport of the intercultural relations evident in the ‘flame relay’ prior to the games in 2008, and evident in the Beijing Olympics themselves, is yet to be fully assessed. While the security arrangements surrounding mega-events, such as in the lead up to London 2012 have become ever tighter, such issues are symptoms of these wider set of dilemmas regarding global relations. These dilemmas concern the emergent global, cultural, economic and political figuration of the twenty-first century. Insights to such issues can be gained from a process-sociological perspective – the study of London 2012 may well prove no exception.

It's not just sport: Delhi and the Olympic torch relay1

This essay studies the 2008 Tibetan protests in Delhi over the Olympic torch relay as a case study to understand the political and social symbolism attached to the rituals of the Olympic relay. It analyses the impact of the political tightrope walked by the Government of India as it sought to balance its diplomatic priorities, in pursuing the recent thaw in Sino-Indian relations, with the imperatives of a democratic public culture. India has been host to the Dalai Lama since the 1950s and the Beijing Olympics provided the trigger for a renewed focus on the Tibetan question. The Delhi leg of the Olympic flame relay emerged as an important cog in the global chain of pro-Tibetan protests that the Games ignited. This essay studies the local manifestations of the Delhi protests, the organization and mechanism of the agitation, the counter-measures adopted by the state, the national and international implications of the protests and its broader meaning for the institution of the flame relay itself.

Postscript: History as anthropology

Postscript: History as anthropology