If I had to choose between my wife and my putter... well, I’d miss her.
Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement
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Edited John MacAloon, London: Routledge, 2013. ISBN: 978-041544832-1
The Olympic Flame Relay (OFR) takes place every year the Olympic Games are held. The Olympic Flame is lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece. It is carried by torchbearers and finally enters the Olympic Stadium, on the night of the Opening Ceremony, to mark the beginning of the Games in each host city. The OFR now, the book informs us, attracts five to ten times as many face-to-face spectators as do the Olympic sports contests.
The editor, John MacAloon, is the acknowledged expert on the subject. Eight chapters consist of eye-witness accounts of aspects of the OFR at different Olympics or fully-transcribed interviews with key players.
The book is at its best in the analysis of the purpose of the OFR and the factors which stop it from achieving its purpose ie giving an Olympic experience to people who will never get into a stadium to see live Olympic sport.
One of the challenges is that an OFR depends on finance from the corporate Olympic sponsors. However, this comes at a price and one writer suggests that “the Athens relay was marked by a daily battle against sponsor activation teams, particularly Samsung’s, violating the rules of ritual protocol and good taste and threatening to trivialize the whole phenomenon”. Another eye-witness expressed his surprise that getting sponsor-branded memorabilia seemed more important than being part of the event to the point where “people even missed the arrival of the torchbearer, preferring to stay in line trying to get a free pencil or a baseball cap from the sponsor kiosk”.
The 2008 OFR was marred by pro-Tibet and human rights protests against Chinese government policies to the extent that a senior IOC member, Richard Pound, asserted that the global flame relay for the Beijing Games should never have taken place. The editor suggests that: “The IOC has rarely seemed as bereft of leadership or options as it did during the Beijing OFR demonstrations in major cities”.
The third major issue is security or the organizers’ reaction to perceptions of the need for security. While the idea of the OFR is to allow people around the world to see the torch, the books suggests that the reality is that the Olympic Flame “is always within a security envelope composed of the media track in front, security men on motorcycles to the sides, and the command car behind.” Thus it is virtually impossible for a spectator to get more than a fleeting glimpse of the torch as it passes.
The book further argues that the media van is so close to the torchbearer that he or she is also unable to have visual contact with the audience to the extent that: “It gave the impression that the whole organization was being executed for the sake of the media, for them to capture the torchbearer running and not for the actual moment of running itself..[and that] the Olympic Flame Relay is being transformed from a special ritual to just another television event”.
The book also notes that the general perception is that the honour of being a torchbearer is bestowed upon deserving ordinary people whereas in reality 70% are corporate sponsor nominees. This also raised the uncomfortable situation that if a torchbearer wished to keep the torch as a souvenir, they had to pay up to £300 – unless they happened to be a sponsor’s nominee when they got the torch free! The book adds: “It is perhaps no surprise that some torches ‘got lost’ during the OFR”.
Other issues dealt with include an entire chapter on the OFR in India and the way the US media covered the OFR.
I was also fascinated by a comment by the editor on the religious nature of the OFR: “For example I’ve seen many Catholics and Orthodox spontaneously cross themselves as they carry the flame or as it passes them by on the road. I’ve interviewed dozens of Christians who have been startled and moved by the flame appearing just over the heads of those standing in front of them on the street comer, instantly identifying it with the Pentecostal tongue of flame in their religion”.
The book, which makes expert opinion accessible to the general reader, will undoubtedly be the authoritative source of material on the Olympic Flame Relay for many years to come.