2023-12-02 02:21:04
It is the most famous symbol of the Olympic Games. In 2024, the Olympic flame will set the Parisian sky ablaze, after traveling several thousand kilometers from Olympia, Greece. The ritual is immutable, but it has not always had the face given to it by the Games of the modern era. Originally, the relay and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron had no connection.
The symbolism of the flame comes to us from Greek mythology, when the Titan Prometheus stole the fire from Olympus to give it to men, whom he had just created despite Zeus’s ban. His crime resulted in him being chained to the summit of Mount Caucasus and seeing his liver devoured every day by an eagle, the organ regenerating after dark.
In ancient times, the Olympic flame and relay were not linked
Ancient Greece perpetuated the memory of this mythical sacrifice, by placing fire at the heart of many religious ceremonies, including during the Games. The sacred flame burned on the altar of the hearth goddess, Hestia, in Olympia, where the athletes’ banquet was given, throughout the duration of the trials.
The relay was absent. On the other hand, it was well organized for other celebrations to glorify the gods. It was at the heart of the lampadedromia, these torchlight races to the altar of a divinity. During the Panathenaia, in Athens, in honor of the goddess Athena, teams of forty runners competed over a few kilometers to the Parthenon. The victors gained the honor of relighting the sacred fire there.
A legacy… of Nazism
When Baron de Coubertin launched the first Olympic Games of the modern era, in 1896, there was neither flame nor relay. The fire did not appear until thirty-two years later, in Amsterdam in 1928. That year, the organizers decided to light a cauldron in the Olympic stadium. Four years later, in Los Angeles, the same ritual was adopted.
It was not until 1936, for the Berlin Games, that the relay was established. The idea is attributed to Carl Diem, theoretician of sport and physical education, very close to the Nazi party, and general secretary of the organizing committee. During the opening ceremony, German athlete Siegfried Eifrig became the first torchbearer to light the cauldron in an Olympic stadium.
For the Nazi leaders, the symbolism of the flame intersected with the theory of the superior race, which borrowed the cult of the body from ancient Greece. The 1936 relay became a propaganda element in its own right. German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl even went so far as to recreate the torch’s journey for the purposes of her film “Olympia”, about the Berlin Olympic Games.
The origin of the modern Olympic relay is the source of much controversy. However, it was perpetuated in all subsequent editions of the competition. Since 1952, the lighting of the flame in Olympia has even been the subject of a ritual responding to precise codes and subsequently filmed by cameras around the world.
A ritual created from scratch
A few months before the Games – winter or summer – a ceremony recreating Greek mythology and led by women is organized on the ruins of the temple of Hera, mother of Prometheus. The flame is ignited using a parabolic mirror concentrating the sun’s rays.
The fire is then carried, in a ceramic urn, to the ancient stadium of Olympia, where it is transmitted to the torch of the first torchbearer. Created from scratch, this rite is at the origin of the journey of the Olympic flame, which takes place at each Olympiad, every two years since 1992. That of the Paris Games should be lit in May 2024, for an arrival at the Stade de France in July.
When the Olympic flame goes out…
The journey of the Olympic flame from Olympia has not always been a smooth river. On several occasions, it was turned off accidentally or deliberately during the relay or after switching on the basin. To relight it, it is imperative to use the emergency flame, also from Olympia and kept under cover throughout an Olympiad.
In 1976, a violent storm blew out the Montreal cauldron, a few days after the opening ceremony. Relighted by an organizer using a simple lighter, it had to be extinguished a second time to be relighted according to the rules. Accidental extinguishings also occurred in 2004 and 2012. In 2008, the flame was deliberately cut off during the relay, disrupted by demonstrations, before being lit again using the emergency flame.
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