Olympic Flame Research Articles

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.

‘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.

American media, intercultural stories and the 2004 Olympic flame ceremonies

This paper explores backstage conventions and conditions for national and local broadcasting of the Olympic Games. While the Olympic Movement sees sport as a means to the larger end of intercultural understanding, American media largely frame the Games as a competition among nations for the glory of athletic victory and superiority. ‘Covering’ the Olympics within this dominant framework leads the American broadcaster National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) to a studied disinterest in intercultural stories, becoming itself a roadblock to understanding foreign cultures and the Olympic ethos, rituals and symbols. The author, a Greek-American and local NBC employee at the time of the Athens 2004 Olympics, describes her struggles to generate intercultural programming and interprets NBC's refusal to allow American audiences to view the 2004 flame-lighting ceremonies at Ancient Olympia and the relay through Greece as lost opportunities to temper the stereotyping of host cultures for the American public.

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.

How Far to the Flame? Getting to the Point in 2012

Abstract The Olympic flame can inspire young people to take up sport and develop their bodies. Neville Davies, John Marriott, Kate Richards and Lauren Adams have a way to help it develop their minds as well. The project was awarded the London Olympics Inspire Mark in October 2011.

The politicisation of the Beijing Olympics

The politicisation of the Beijing Olympics

Lighting the Olympic Flame

The 1905 establishment of the British Olympic Association (BOA) signalled the first real awakening of British interest in the international Olympic movement. Unlike the mismatched and loosely organized band of British athletes that competed in the previous three editions of Olympic competition, the fledging BOA successfully raised an 'official’ Great Britain team to compete at the 1906 Intercalated Games held in Athens, Greece. The Athens games, while serving as a landmark in Britain's Olympic history, forcefully revealed the national and ethnic tensions that existed between the constituent parts of the British Isles, as well as the growing fallacy of Britain's historical claims to international sporting dominance.

Fanning the Flame: Transformations of the 2004 Olympic Flame

This article highlights some snapshots of the ‘social life' of the 2004 Olympic flame and discusses the transformations of its meanings from the moment of its lighting until its extinction at the closing ceremony, as it circulates through various social contexts and within multiple areas of practice and discourse. By following the flame's oscillation between the tangible and the transcendental, the metaphorical and the metaphysical, the ephemeral and the eternal, one can explore its dynamic participation in Olympic affairs, its involvement in negotiations of power and its adaptability to different personal, national or international histories, fantasies, experiences or expectations. Its emotive power owes to this malleability as well as to the multiplicity of sometimes contradictory meanings and values which are layered, recycled or transformed throughout its life.

Spain: Media Focus on the Geopolitical Issues of a Major Sporting Event

This work aims to analyse the coverage of the 2008 torch lighting ceremony throughout the newspapers El País, La Vanguardia and El Mundo, the video delivered by the public regional channel Televisió de Catalunya and the private television CNN Plus. This research also includes a study of the Yahoo webpage devoted to the Beijing Olympic Games and the videos that YouTube indexed in Spanish language referring to the lighting ceremony. In the Spanish media, the protests were given greater significance than the symbolism and ceremony surrounding this unique sporting event. Spanish newspapers emphasized the protests during the torch ceremony, giving a geopolitical slant to the occasion rather than treating it as a sporting event. YouTube constructed for the searches in Spanish an image of lighting ceremony in which the incident played an important role together with domestic videos of the Olympic flame carried through the streets of Buenos Aires days after the lighting ceremony.

Greece: The Olympic Torch Relay in Ancient Olympia – An Ideal Showcase for International Political Protest

While analysing the way China was presented by the Greek media in relation to the torch lighting and relay ceremony (24 March–30 May 2008), the author makes some introductory and summarized remarks on the social and cultural background in Greece against which the reports were broadcast. This paper examines the main news reports of two television stations: one is the public television channel NET, and the other is MEGA CHANNEL, a private station. Moreover, two daily newspapers with a wide national readership, namely the morning Kathimerini and the afternoon Eleftherotypia, have been studied. In addition, information was gathered from two Internet portals (in.gr and pathfinder.gr) and from several websites and blogs. Three major events concerning China occurred in the period examined: the ceremony of the lighting the Olympic flame in Ancient Olympia, the torch relay in Greek and foreign territory, the doping scandal of the Greek weightlifting team and the earthquake and the influence on the games.

Thoughts on the Real Macroeconomic Effects of Beijing 2008 Olympics on Chinese Economy

Although, the Olympic Flame with the closing of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, extinguished, the enthusiasm of the world towards the Olympic Games keeps going. So the thoughts of the effects from Olympics onto the host country. This study, after presenting the general ideas of the Olympic economic effects that is boom to bust, briefly analyzed the macroeconomic effects of the Beijing Olympics on Chinese Economy. And based on authorized statistics and through the methods of comparison and deduction, the study concluded that those effects will keep functioning on transformation of Chinese economic growth pattern and through the sectors of transportation, banking, insurance and travel consumption in a long term.

Event sponsorship and ambush marketing: Lessons from the Beijing Olympics

Sponsorship of large sporting and cultural events has become a major marketing communication tool, particularly when firms obtain exclusive rights and garner the hype associated with this honor. Concomitantly, ambush marketing—defined as attempts by competitors to exploit the event—has also increased in prominence. This article outlines what is known as the Li Ning affair, whereby major Olympic sponsor Adidas was ambushed by lesser-known Chinese sportswear company Li Ning, whose namesake founder was the most decorated Chinese Olympian and who lit the Olympic flame at the 2008 Beijing Olympiad. Data collected immediately following the closing of the Beijing Games isolates what we call the Li Ning effect—or, being incorrectly identified as an official sponsor—and the positive effects this has on measures of brand attitude and recommendation likelihood. As presented herein, seven lessons about ambush marketing can be derived from the Li Ning affair, which sponsors and those considering sponsorship opportunity might wish to learn.

Olympic tears

Olympic tears

Birth of Olympic flame: Ancient Greece and European identity (II)

The anti-Chinese protests that were organized throughout European cities fol­lowing the route of the Olympic torch from Athens to Beijing, and the conflicts that erupted with strong emotions on both sides between the protestors and the Chinese citizens, will without a doubt remain a lasting memory of the 2008 Olympic games. Regardless of these protests' justified motives, there is a visible paradoxical role-switch in the scenes that circled the globe for months: the Olympic torch and Olympic idea, were being defended by China as a highest value and the source of their own past and identity, and attacked by the people (Europeans) on whose land that very idea had been created and nurtured for over a hundred years. How should these contradictory images be understood? How did it come to this that the Chinese view themselves as the keepers of the Olympic tradition, that the pride of the Chinese nation, focused in that flame, gets hurt in attempts of European protestors to put it out? The modern Olympic Games, founded in 1896, were one of the echoes of a centuries' long Western European fascination with the Antique. This phenomenon of the Antique admiration has brought about a redefining of the European civilization's past, the abandoning the biblical narrative and the gradual creation of a secular story that we call modern history, in which Greece and Rome have become the main references of origin. The same process influenced the formation of national states that perceive, apart from their own histories, a collective cultural origin in Ancient Greece. Of course, the Galls, Francs or Germans had little in common with ancient Greeks; but modern European nations unite this fictional image of the Antique with the firm belief that it is the source of their cultural identity. For instance, not only did the 18th century French and English believe that they originated from ancient Greece but they managed to successfully 'sell' that story to modern Greeks, and later the entire world. In that sense, it is impossible not to see a parallel with China today. As it adopted the Western model in almost every respect during the course of its development, starting with accepting the communist ideology in the early stages of its westernization, and then liberal economy, and finally the Olympics, China has implicitly adopted the European identity narrative. Critics, on the other hand, fail to see the magnitude of the discrepancy that this country with such a rich tradition has made towards the West in the last several decades. To the (still living) arrogant European colonial state of mind it goes without saying that China should want to be 'like us' and accept the Olympic tradition. This same arrogance fails to ask itself if, for instance, He Kexin's Olympic gold medal in gymnastics is a victory for China or for the West.

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.

Negotiating absence: Bernard Tschumi's new Acropolis Museum in Athens

The ambition to inaugurate the new Acropolis Museum illuminated by the Olympic flame of 2004 and broadcast worldwide was not fulfilled. Difficulties and delays of practical, economic and archaeological nature were in the end less daunting than the political, legal and ideological obstacles to the aspiration of crowning the new museum with the Elgin Marbles, which were moved to London about two hundred years ago. The expatriation of the Parthenon fragments and the repeated requests for repatriation, both brought to play in Bernard Tschumi's highly persuasive structure, define a striking prism through which to look at some of the urgent and conflicting issues haunting the museum institution today (Fig. 1). Driven by the ideals of enlightenment, the idea of the public, universal museum, perfect and complete, proliferated at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1796, only three years after the foundation of the Muséum Français (the later Musée du Louvre), Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy advised passionately against the relocation of antique monuments to European capitals in his ‘Lettres au géneral Miranda sur le préjudice qu'occasionnens aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monumens de l'art de l'Italie, Le démembrement de ses écoles, et la spoliation de ses collections, galeries, musées, etc.’1 In hindsight, however, the physical removal of ancient art and architecture marks not only the decontextualisation of these objects, but also their re-location from one discourse to another. Once relocated to the museum, architectural elements are invested with new functions and historical and aesthetic values that radically alter their significance. Thus, as Greece today reclaims the Elgin Marbles by means of a compelling architectural rhetoric, the discourse on decontextualisation gets a new twist, now including the possible re-contextualisation of a fragment whose original context has changed beyond recognition. In fact, Quatremère himself anticipated this delicious paradox in his Canova-correspondence of 1818 on the Parthenon Collection in London. Here, Quatremère addressed with surprising precision a fundamental museo-theoretical problem regarding decontextualisation as well as re-contextualisation; a problem to which Tschumi's design for the new Acropolis Museum gives such an eloquent architectural manifestation.

International Olympic Committee and the Olympic system: the governance of world sport

When the athletes enter the stadium and the Olympic flame is lit, the whole world watches. Billions will continue to follow the events and to share in the athletes' joys and sorrows for the next sixteen days. Readers of this book, however, will watch forthcoming editions of the Olympic Games in a completely different light. Unlike many historical or official publications and somewhat biased commercial works, it provides -- in a clear, readable form -- informative and fascinating material on many aspects of what Olympism is all about: its history, its organization and its actors. Although public attention is often drawn to various issues surrounding this planetary phenomenon -- whether concerning the International Olympic Committee, the athletes, the host cities or even the scandals that have arisen -- the Olympic System as such is relatively little known. What are its structures, its goals, its resources? How is it governed and regulated? What about doping, gigantism, violence in the stadium? In addition to providing a wealth of information on all these subjects, the authors also show how power, money and image have transformed Olympism over the decades. They round off the work with thought-provoking reflections regarding the future of the Olympic System and the obstacles it must overcome in order to survive.

Route of the Olympic flame: Beijing as a guardian of the antique cult of the European nations

It is without doubt that the 2008 Olympic Games in Peking will be remembered as the most grandiose, most spectacular and most expensive sport manifestation ever organized. Ratings are uniform: it will be very difficult to attain a standard posed by Peking in any recent time. Again, through the organization of this manifestation, China resurfaced as a powerful, wealthy and modern country, ready for the challenges of the 21st century. However, a shadow is cast upon China, in spite of its economic power, due to the country's autocratic political system. China's lack of democracy, human rights and liberties and position of minorities have provoked a harsh criticism among the Western countries, reflected at the time when China was granted Olympic games for 2008. Since then, the criticism continues especially directed at the decision of the Olympic committee, with several calls to boycott the Games itself. Anti-Chinese rallies were intensified this spring, when the Olympic torch started its way from Greece to Peking. Thousands of demonstrators worldwide- defenders of the Tibet's freedom- have tried to stop the carriers of the torch, trying to put out 'the eternal flame' and disable its route to the final destination. The torch has changed its route many times in order to deceive the protestors and takeover was also a subject to change and many manipulations. In any case, the broadcasted scenes of conflict between the demonstrators and Chinese official escorts and citizens, charged with emotions at both sides, will remain as a recall of the Olympic Games 2008 for a long time. Regardless of the possible justified cause of this protest, in the worldwide broadcasted scenes for many months there was a totally paradoxical change of roles: the Olympic flame, as well as the idea, China has defended as its own, as a highest value and also as a source and holiness of its own past and identity, while the Europeans, on whose territory that same idea and values were once created, attacked fiercely those same notions. How are we to understand these contradictory images? How it came about that China experience itself as heiress of the Olympic tradition and how it happened that the pride of the Chinese nation concentrated in the flame, be hurt by the attempts of the European demonstrators to put it out? Modern Olympic Games, founded in 1896, presented itself as one of the echoes of centuries' long fascination of the Antique era experienced by the Westerners. This phenomenon of the Antique admiration has brought about a new redefinition of the European past and civilization ranging from abandoning Biblical story and gradual building of the secular one which we came to call modern history. In that modern history, Ancient Greece and Rome became the two main references about origin. The same process has lead to formation of national states, which, besides making their own national history, had in common the perceived joint origin in the Ancient Greece. Of course, Gauls, Franks or Germanics had very little in common with the ancient Greeks; the common characteristics of the modern European nations are precisely the invention of the Antique images and a firm belief in it as a source of the cultural identity. For instance, the French and British have believed, at the end of the 18th century, they could trace their origin back to the Ancient Greece; in addition, they have managed to successfully 'sell' the story to the modern Greeks and afterward to the rest of the world. In this sense, it is not possible not to see the parallel with the modern China. Adopting the Western model in almost everything, from communist ideology as its first phase of westernization, to liberal economy, and finally to Olympic Games, China implicitly adopts the European story on origin. Critiques however, do not clearly see the range of this discrepancy that the country with such rich tradition has made in the last several decades toward the West. An arrogant colonial European mind holds it understandable that China accepts the Olympic tradition, since it wants to 'look like us'. This same arrogance fails to question, for example, if a golden medal in gymnastics that He Kexin won at this Games, is a victory for China or the West.

Science in China: 30 Years On

Three decades after introducing market reforms and opening up to the rest of the world, China has become a major economic power. As the country prepares to show the world its sporting might, its competitiveness in life sciences may still need a boost.