A History of the Olympic Torch Relay: Part III, Race Resurfaces

As we have previously discussed, the Olympic Torch Relay was founded by the Nazi party in the 1936 to communicate an idea of racial hegemony . We have also seen that the Torch itself slowly became a means of showing off the technological prowess of the host nation. We shall see though that whilst the International Olympic Committee and the local organising committees of the Olympic Games following World War II all concentrated on the minutiaem they were unaware that through its very success as a cinematic or latterly televised spectacle the torch relay was evolving out of their control

By the time of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo the torch relay had become a symbol of the International Olympic Committee’s expanding empire and its relationship with film had become firmly established. In Kon Ichikawa’s beautiful film of the Tokyo Olympiad –the best there has been – the rising sun of Japan and the Olympic flame are linked, as if they both emerge from the same tradition; a kind of symbolism that pushes the relationship between host land and Olympic spirit beyond history. However, Ichikawa also wanted to give the relay a political narrative. After a slow intoning of all the Western countries that the Games have been held in Ichikawa shows the torch passing through Istanbul, Beirut and Tehran.  ‘The torch travels through Asia for the first time,’ says the voiceover, asserting the Oriental’s role in world sport.

The torch relay was beginning to acquire other narratives not simply of cultural primacy. It had now become a symbol of peace. The visit it made to Hiroshima in 1964 was perhaps its most important stop on that trip. This conjoining of the flame with the eternal flame of war memorials had been first suggested in 1948, when the torch stopped in Brussels on the way to London for a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was however optimistic that the International Olympic Committee could position itself at the juncture of major forces in world politics and act as an agent for improved global relations.

In addition the way that the torch bearers were perceived changed. In 1952 in Helsinki with the tradition of the torch relay now entrenched, the home nation gave the honour to Paavo Nurmi, a rotund balding 55-year-old. In 1924 Nurmi had won gold medals in five events, including the 1500m, 5000m, the 3000m team race, and two cross country events. The identity of the runner was becoming more important than his physical appearance. As TV rather than film became the dominant means of broadcasting the torch relay, the camera became less concerned with the athlete’s body as an abstracted image but with the athlete as a personality.

The montage that opens Bud Greenspan’s film of the 1984 Olympics torch relay focuses on the series of different individuals who carried the torch, in close up. There are a huge range of different skin tones and ages in the sequence. Greenspan highlights the racial mix of Angelinos and presents them as a global audience, in close up. It’s like a Coca-Cola ad with the Angelinos standing in for the global market. The inhabitants of the city had voted in a public referendum not to give public funds to the event so to survive, these Games were sold as a commodity like Coke. Less of a theatrical set-piece within a romanticised landscape, the torch relay now became a piece of television, which was broadcast as live and edited rather than staged.

As a consequence, the Los Angeles Games inadvertently made the relay harder to control. By enlisting the people of LA to represent a global audience for the sake of a commercial they brought the torch, the camera and the people closer a move which would later cause untold problems for the IOC.

In 2008, it was announced that the Olympic torch relay would no longer pass through foreign countries. And just as the British were largely responsible for giving birth to the torch relay by continuing the Nazi set piece, they were also responsible for causing its cessation as an international event.

It was probably the sight of Konnie Huq, a former presenter of the children’s TV programme Blue Peter tussling with a protestor on Ladbroke Grove that Britons most remember. The torch relay was proposed by the organisers of the Beijing Games and their British Olympic Association partners as a way of linking sporting celebrity with the common people. As a result the torch relay through London was a mix of normal folk, famous Olympic athletes and well-known faces. This gave a focus for the groundswell of protest against the occupation of Tibet, an act that had hitherto untroubled the British people at large. There was perhaps a latent sympathy with the fate of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s leader in exile, but as a protest movement it was far more popular in the United States and only really developed moment as the Olympic Games in Beijing drew near. A number of British celebrities withdrew from the torch relay citing the occupation of Tibet as a reason. Huq more used to showing British children how to make dolls houses from empty plastic bottles had already made her displeasure at the invasion of Tibet by China known but decided that she would continue with her role as torch bearer.

Rolling news ensured that her attempt to keep hold of the Olympic Torch was instantly shown live around the world creating a negative impression of the Olympics, although this was nothing compared to the unfilmed protests by the Czechs in the soon-to-be annexed Sudetenland during the first torch relay in 1936.

However, in 2008, the Torch Relay was no longer a set-piece for a remote camera. It was a live performance in which the audience was increasingly determined to be involved. The role of the torch as symbol of the Olympic movement became compromised. As ignominious as it was for children’s TV presenters to be seen brawling with an advocate of Tibetan independence on the streets of London, it was the phalanx of Chinese Secret Service men trying to prise them apart that did it for the international torch relay. The torch immediately lost the symbolism of internationalism that it had acquired in the post-war period and became an image of a single nation making its political presence felt in foreign lands. Indeed the space around the torch protected by the Chinese security effectively became Chinese territory, as British police later admitted that they didn’t know who the figures in lilac tracksuits surrounding the torch bearer were and had no control over their actions.

The Torch Relay’s power as a propagandist tool for the Olympics and the countries that host the Games had finally become a weakness. Having brought the torch close to the lives of its audience, the audience now refused to be passive and reached out for the torch. The torch was now vulnerable to political activism and appropriately given the origins of the event this activism was inextricably linked to the politics of race.  In Beijing, the strongest argument for an end to the international torch relay, at least for future Games, came from Kevan Gosper, the IOC vice-president in charge of media relations. Strangely he showed a poor grasp of Olympic history. ‘I’m a firm believer that we had the right template in the first place, that the torch simply should go from Olympia, Greece, to the host country,’ he said in 2008. This was an absolute nonsense of course. The whole point of the Olympic Torch was that it be carried through foreign nations.

Those who followed the build up to the Games in Sydney in 2000 would have recognise the name of Kevan Gosper, however. In 2000, Gosper, a former Olympic athlete and member of the International Olympic Committee, was Vice President of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.  In the build up to the 2000 Games, Gosper became embroiled in issues around the Olympic Torch Relay. A young Greek Australian Yianna Souleles had been selected by her school’s teaching staff following arrangements made by the local parish priest and the Greek Olympic Committee, to run the first leg of the torch relay after the torch was lit on Mount Olympus. According to most media reports, Gosper was separately approached by Greek Olympic committee members who asked him to let his daughter Sophie replace Yianna. It was also likely that the Greek Committee want to ingratiate itself with Gosper, a vice-president of the IOC.

Athlete and future bureaucrat. Kevan Gosper in 1951.

What Gosper did next was incredibly unwise. He accepted the invitation on behalf of this daughter, later defending this decision on the grounds that he felt in his heart that it was appropriate for Sophie, the daughter of an Olympian to carry the torch first. The original invitee Yianna was downgraded to a later leg of the relay. Gosper argued he had not acted inappropriately. Critics however, such as Helen Jefferson Lenskyj suggested that there was a racial motive to the swap. The Australian academic suggests in her book The Best Olympics Ever?  that the Greeks invited Gosper’s daughter to be involved because of  ‘her blonde hair and blue eyes’ that made her look ‘more like a typical Australian girl’. Here we see the most troubling element of the relay – that the torch carrier represents not just a nation but also a racial type – rearing its head again.

Lenskyj may overstate the case against Gosper of course and the allegations of racial bias are hard to corroborate. Gosper may have simply reacted naively to an act of Greek politicking. It is also quite possible that the Hellenic Olympic committee preferred to subsequently argue that they had invited Sophie because she looked Australian rather than because she was the daughter of an Olympic grandee. It is possible that they thought that dealing with accusations of racism in sections of the Australian press was easier to deal with rather than accusations of corruption in their own. For Gosper it was clearly a salutary lesson.

The history of the Olympic movement may provide a rich pageant of ceremony and symbolism from which to draw strength and by which to promote itself. However that  collection of images and gestures has its own latent history, which can frequently assert itself regardless of the control of a modern International Olympics Committee, keen to make the Games socially relevant.

In fact as we shall see the more the IOC and its partners attempt to control the images the more they become problematic. For now we must wonder at how a man steeped in the history of the Olympic movement could fail to understand that a northern European running through a Hellenic landscape was a particularly charged image and one to avoid repeating.