Map of the sites to be visited by the Torch Relay in 2012

As the organisers of the London Olympics propose ever more stupid stunts that the Olympic Torch must perform during the Olympic torch relay – zip-wire over the Tyne, abseiled down a tower in Grimbsy,  taken in a steamer across Lake Windemere, we should wonder why it is being kept so busy. As it is being shown a good time round the tourist spots of the United Kingdom no doubt being fed traditional ice-cream all the way, perhaps we should reflect on quite why the torch is being given a stay-cation rather than a holiday abroad.

Take a look at a map of the torch relay route and you may be surprised for not noticing one important fact. It is only being run in the UK. This is very rare in Olympic history: a host nation generally allows the torch to be run through different countries, other than Greece before it arrives in the host city. This has come to symbolise a degree of fraternity amongst nations, but which due to important historic reasons is fraught with tension. As we consider why the Torch Relay for the 2012 Games is being run solely within the UK, it is worth remembering a couple of things: 1. The relay was devised by the Nazis and born from a racist and aggressively expansionist world-view. 2. Despite the more peaceful world we live in the Torch Relay continues to be problematic and before the Athens Olympics in 2004 proved to be hugely problematic because of a racial dimension.

In 2008 the International Olympic Committee already highly sensitised to criticism of it which had racial overtones ran its last international torch relay i.e. a relay that passes from Olympia through a number of foreign territories before arriving at the host city. One cannot help but wondering what Kevan Gosper thought when was given the task as Head of IOC’s press commission to defend the torch relay in 2008. In 2004, he had accept an invitation on behalf of his daughter to run a leg of the relay extended by the organisers of the Greek games, in place of another Australian girl of Greek extraction. Both the invitation and his acceptance were construed as having over racial overtones.

Yet on April 11 2008, Gosper was defending the relay on the 7.30 Report on ABC in Australia saying that: ‘the torch stands for goodwill, international understanding, celebration of the Games’. He stated that it should not be the focus of protests against China. Yet as we saw here in London, the Torch ceased to represent the Olympics and was identified with China.

It is certainly easier to credit now but anti-Chinese sentiment at the time of the Torch Relay was strong in the UK. Certainly there were very real disagreement with China’s occupation of Tibet at the time but a general feeling of unease went further.  At the time, the general economic strength of the country was seen as a growing threat. Just as the Chinese saw the Olympics as a means of showing their new economic confidence in a benign way, so the West, in particular, saw it as a sign of the threat of China. Criticisms of China’s role in Tibet often slipped into sinophobia. To environmentalists, China’s industrialisation became the focus of excessive criticism from Western countries who were just as guilty of polluting the atmosphere. Everything from the air quality in Beijing to the amount of steel used in the National Stadium became a stick with which to beat the Chinese. More explicit criticism was made of China’s role in funding Janjaweed militia forces in Darfur in Sudan.

Map from the BBC showing Olympic Relay route for 2004 in Asia http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7005984.stm

The Olympics became embroiled in this. Writing in The Guardian early in 2008, Simon Tisdall invoked the ghost of the Berlin Olympics by stating that ‘not since the prewar era have the games assumed such a key role in the assertion of the virility, potential, and sense of entitlement of a nation reborn.’ Tisdall went on to say that the Olympics structures are ‘deliberate architectural projections of national power.’ (If you take one thing from this blog, it is that EVERY Games involves an assertion of the virility, potential and sense of entitlement of a nation reborn’ and that EVERY Olympic structure is a deliberate projection of national power whether it is done overtly or not.) Nothing shows how protests against the Chinese were based not on pro-Tibetan or pro-democratic sentiment on anti-Chinese feeling than the response to the earthquake in Sichuan. On May 12 an a quake measuring 8.0 on the richter scale hit Wenchuan County in Sichuan province killing around 70,000 people. For China it was a tragedy. For the International Olympics Committee it changed everything.

On 23 May 2008, USA Today reported that ‘China’s deadly earthquake may have saved the Beijing Olympics.’  Quoted in the article was Gerhard Heiberg, a member of the IOC’s executive board member and its marketing director.‘I’m sorry to say it, but this [the Sichuan earthquake] has turned things around,’ he said.  And indeed as images of devastated areas of Sichuan were broadcast around the world and president Hu Jintao made great capital of going to the quake region, protests about. China’s state-controlled media allowed uncharacteristic openness and permitted 24-hour earthquake coverage. The Chinese government drew praise for its quick earthquake response.

Live news of the earthquake broadcast on large screens in downtown Beijing, May 2004

On May 20, the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Zamiska interviewed Jill Savitt, director of Dream for Darfur campaign which had been protesting China’s support of the Sudanese government.  “The tone of advocacy has to change because of the earthquake,” she said. “It would really be unwise and unstrategic to continue to pound on China and not to realize that there have been hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed and wounded. It would be foolhardy.” Gosper, the poor Australian who was destined to watch as the real world crashed into the Torch Relay, cautioned that the IOC “in principle tried to avoid ceremonial events referring to tragedies around the world.” However, given that he’d had such a hard time keeping the issue of Tibet out of the Torch Relay, he seemed to relent a little. “On such an issue that has affected a host country, I believe that the president of the IOC would have a very open mind and listen to the advice coming from Beijing organizers,’ he told the Associated Press. As it was Lin Hao, a nine year old from Yingxiu in Wenchuan County led the Chinese national team in and no explicit reference was made in the Opening Cermony. But by that time the damage had been done. It wasn’t until March the following year that  the International Olympic Committee (IOC) scrapped international relays. By that stage organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have already said they had no plans to take the torch outside Britain. “We have always said the primary focus would be on a domestic torch relay whose main purpose is to excite and inspire the UK in the build-up to the games. We planned to take our lead from the IOC and are very happy with this decision as it mirrors what we were intending to do,” said a London 2012 spokeswoman. At this stage the IOC made a strange claim. IOC executive director Gilbert Felli told the BBC that: “After the (2004) relay in Athens, which was the first international relay,we came to the conclusion it was easier for the torch to stay inside the (host) country.’ [My emphasis]

Totally untrue of course. As we have seen the Torch Relay was created as an international event. Without a shred of irony, the Official Report to the Games of 1948 notes that: “In September, 1946, the Organising Committee decided that the lighting of the Sacred Fire should be carried out by a Torch kindled in the traditional manner at Olympia, in Greece, and carried by relays of runners across Europe to London.” Owing to the armed struggle against Communist insurgents in the north of Greece the flame went from Olympia to the coast at Katakolon, thence by Greek warship to the island of Corfu. From Corfu which had become a centre for British operations in the Mediterranean during the recent war, H.M.S. Whitesand Bay, a frigate of the Mediterranean Fleet, carried the Flame to Bari in Italy from whence it was run through, Foggia, Pescara, Ancona, Rimini, Bologna, Parma, Piacenza and Milan. Then the flame was run through Switzerland into France to Poligny, Nancy and Metz, then Luxembourg, Belgium and back into France to Lille and finally Calais. It was carried across the channel on a destroyer called. H.M.S. Bicester which had harried and destroyed Italian submarines and German U-boats in the Mediterranean throughout the war.  The British made certain that the Torch Relay was run through the lands in Europe which their armies had only recently liberated from fascism. If Lene Riefenstahl’s film had shown the torches progress through the Balkans, as Ian Sinclair puts it, like  ’an invasion rehearsal’, the British ran it through the same lands like a second victory parade. Far from being dominated by an idea of austerity as the BBC suggests here, the second torch relay was all about triumphalism.

"The torch pursued a quick path through an unstable Europe" - image courtesy of the BBC.

Each organising committee had chosen the route for its relay and an international route communicates a narrative of national identity very clearly, in a negative way or a positive one. For the Mexico City Olympics the Torch folowed the course of Columbus`s first voyage to the New World, ‘thus’, according to the offical report, ‘symbolizing the union of the classic cultures of the Mediterranean with those of America’. The three principal intermediate points along the Route of the Torch were Genoa, Italy, birthplace of Christopher Columbus; Palos, Spain, the port from which he embarked on his first voyage of discovery; and the island of San Salvador, where he first touched in the New World. The torch arrived in Barcelona in Spain by sea and was then run 1,286 kilometres across Spain to Palos. A man caled Cristóbal Colón Carbajal, a direct descendant of Columbus, carried it on the last leg.

Map of the Torch Relay for the 1980 Olympic Games

The overall length for the Torch Relay route  for the Moscow Games in 1980 was 5,000 km including 1,170 in the territory of Greece, 935 in Bulgaria, 593 in Romania and 2,302 in the USSR. This had the added bonus of promoting communist solidarity with its south-western neighbours. Open athletics events were organised along the route to coincide with the torches arrival. Around the burner for the torch the words “Olympia-Athens-Sofia- Bucharest-Moscow” were worked in metal. For other Olympics such as 1976 in Montreal or 1984 in Los Angeles, it was just run within the nation hosting the Games only. This appears to have been through no other reason than it offering an opportunity to raise the profile of the coming event within the host nation – to drum up a few ticket sales and, certainly in the latter case, increase the revenue from sponsorship. From now on this will be the case for all Games. What has happened to the Relay is that the original intension of the Relay to prove the hegemony of the nation to which the torch is being run, had been placed back on it, by protestors. Carl Diem and Leni Riefenstahl wanted to show that the culture of the Ancient Greeks was being adopted by the Third Reich. I don’t believe the Chinese Government were trying to do anything as crass. And yet that is exactly what protestors believed the Chinese goverment were doing reacted to it accordingly. They were only able to have an impact because the way in which this setpiece, originally created for film, was recorded. Rolling news made a pageant derived from classical sculpture into a painfully long, event that is impossible to defend from intervention by individual agents and therefore impossible to choreograph. And if you can’t choreograph something, you can’t control its meaning.

Map of the sites to be visited by the Torch Relay in 2012

The Olympic flame will arrive in the UK on Friday 18 May 2012 and will travel around the UK for 70 days, arriving in London the weekend before the 2012 Games begin. 95 per cent of the UK population to be within a one hour journey time of the Torch Relay and it will visit every local authority. 8,000 torch bearers will be selected with over half of the places expected to go to young people. Sebastian Coe, Chair of LOCOG said: ‘The London 2012 Torch Relay will connect people and places; young people to sport and the UK to the rest of the world. We will be working closely with villages, towns and cities the length and breadth of the UK to ensure that as each community welcomes the Olympic Flame, they do so in a way that is unique and special to their area.’ Martin Green head of ceremonies at LOCOG has privately said, that the Olympic relay doesn’t need to be held throughout the world because we have all the nations of the world here in the UK, which is, to be generous, evasive.

The real reason we are not holding the Olympic Torch relay is because the International Olympic Committee are scared that everyone else in the world will express their feelings about the UK in the same way some of us expressed our displeasure at the Chinese through the agency of the torch relay. The degree to which LOCOG is controlling the image of the UK abroad is setting whole new standards within the Olympic movement.

This is part IV of an investigation into the history of the Torch Relay.

Part I can be read here
Part II can be read here
Part III can be read here

What is non-linearity? 
Non-linearity is where my work has been for the last 20 years. It’s been there since 91 when I stated in a lecture in Berlin in 1991 that the informal was a subject. So there’s that area of non-linear. Then there’s The Nonlinear Systems Organization at Penn Design, which I set up in my professorship as the Paul Philippe Cret Practice Professor of Architecture

You were working in a world in which post-modernism held sway. Did your ideas about non-linearity develop in opposition to that?
In the mid-1980s I suppose I felt caught in a trap of a stylised or minimum efficiency model that was running through planning. Architects would draw squares and the site boundary and everything would be reduced within it.  It felt like a very reductive system. It didn’t seem to be a profound design system, it seemed to be formulaic. My task in those days was to answer the architects question ‘where do the columns go?’ I started rebelling against that question. All you do is put in some columns and then another formula comes up about lengths and breadth. It was formulaic.

Did you look to the natural world for influence?
No, I started going back to study – I don’t know why I even thought about it – to read the fundamentals of architecture, so I went back to Vetruvius and to the Greek models and Pythagorean models and what I found there was an entire richness of invention: when it all began. 10,000 years ago. There was a very lively system of proportion. It wasn’t just a case of ‘I’ll put the Parthenon there’. There was a whole proportionate system at work with refinements ultimately but essentially in the guts of it, I found that all sacred architecture was given to certain specific systems of thought. And it made me think what is a modern system of thought? Of course I knew the classical one because we’ve inherited it. I thought that here was geometry as a system. This was what the Greeks had. It was very real for them. Buildings were frozen proportions. That was the way I was practising it and that was the way the people I was working with were practising it. It seemed that it had died somehow. It was now no more. It was now some formulaic system. So I posed questions to myself: ‘what is a contemporary method of looking at similar ideas?’

And what was your answer?
This question took me into algorithms as a new concept. That there could be something where you would start with a local concern only and then move on to compile and that somehow from this process which was completely a reverse to drawing a boundary and then cutting in. this was starting from inside and going outwards to end up somewhere. It seemed a totally different process. It was exciting and it gave me totally different results that looked sensible. That was surprising itself. But also interesting were the spatial effects. That was interesting to me.

Front of the Neue Staatgalerie Stuttgart, 1984. Concept by the British Architect James Stirling

Which projects help you develop these ideas?
I had done it subconsciously at the Neue Staatgalerie in Stutgart with James Stirling collaborating with him, very much led by him. But the famous ice-cream columns on that project came in through debates. Looking back I could see that I was moving my ideas on the subject– that was 1978 – but I didn’t realise that it was labeled. The first real reference for the thinking in practical terms was the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam with Koolhaas. He was a tabula rasa man at the time. He really didn’t want to go down the root of traditional architecture. So he was looking and I was looking and we came together. We were looking for animations, inventions, different ways of how to build. He was looking for more from an urban context and I was looking more from a spatial context. And so it was a happy meeting point.  The Kunsthalle was the first exemplar of how four parts of a building can have completely different systems.

If you walk round the building you can see that structurally there are four different solutions, which is not something you would do on a small building, 60m x 60m plan area. We tried to have a kind of system which could govern every single space and every time I tried to iron out conflicts that came from spatial arrangements – big rooms coming next to small room – it wouldn’t work. What do you do? In the early days I would try to have a system that governed all parts. Simply put, I let that rigidity go and I looked at everything on its own and said what works here? and what works here? If I transit from here to there – then what’s right? In the end a local language grew. It was a very successful project. I had no algorithms as such, but I was already beginning to animate, to make geometric animations in order to make space.

Fundamentally the difference between non-linear work and traditional work is traditional work spaces the gap. Every architect, every design starts here and then thinks about the next thing. You look at a room and then think where does the next one go. It’s about taking space as an empty vessel and putting things into it.

The Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, which opened its doors in 1992

If you are not filling the space what are you doing?
I start somewhere and then I compile the next interval in that process I can chose right angles but the way the vertical would come in relation to the horizontal I believe would be more interesting in a school in a hospital, if I did it my way.

Through the 80s I would work with sketches and model but the late 90s I was working sketch and computer print out and by early 2003 I was working with sketch, computer print-out and 3D prototype. Physical models had dropped away, they were still important but in holistic work – because another part of non-linear work is that you are taking the whole spatial effect in one go. You are not taking parts and putting them together which is the case within reductive processes, if you put the parts together, you can pull them out into parts, hence your focus is only on the small parts. Technically a building is solved – you take a section, you spend hours making the floor work and then you extrude the section and repeat it – so it’s cut and paste methods really. More non-linear methods don’t allow you to do that. It has it’s problems of functionalities and things but so does any process, it’s just how do you master them.

How important is the natural world to your work?
Today, I sat out in my garden for 30 minutes and heard the bird sing and looked up at the trees. And I was quite refreshed. It is because when you look at the cloudscape or the trees there is a certain uniformity – the trees look like trees, in one way – all green in the forest – but there is this variation when you walk through the forest. Similarity and variation. Nature is much more varied than we can make buildings. But there is an element in that story that buildings that have some variation – a controlled variation – not random – within a uniformity.

H_edge consists of around 6000 aluminium plates. Shown as part of the Element exhibition in Tokyo

People think when I called my show Element it was about nature, but I mean Element to refer to OUR nature. I think you create your own logic depending on what you are trying to do.  The bridge in Coimbra in Portugal – had I thought about any pre-context – I went there and looked at the river and I had to see the mayor and I knew the budget was absolutely minimal and I thought what can you do? You can’t do any fancy stuff with cables. I just sat there and thought about the river and thought about being here and going there and what would I do. Me. Personally. That place. From that comes an answer. The same thing happened in Philadelphia when the university asked me to do the footbridge across the railway tracks. Out of that logic of crossing and moving – came a certain narrative. So I came up with an idea of certain traces on the landscape, which became a tectonic and like a good novel 2/3 of the way through there was a crisis – and this thing emerged and wrapped itself around and then unwrapped and that was the denouement and I presented it like a novel. And it won favour with the Trustees.

When I saw it built – I couldn’t believe I had designed that bridge and Coimbra because they are worlds apart. One has a romantic nature a certain extravagance – it bakes in the sun and sparkles like jewels. And the other one in Philadelphia is hard-bitten, industrial and over the railway but they are both – one is a short journey of 45m and the other is 200m – but if you do the journey – you change your narrative.

The Coimbra Footbridge over the Mondego River near Coimbra in Portugal.

How has the establishment of the Nonlinear Systems Organization at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design helped you? What type of research organization is it?
I took up the Paul Philipe Cret Chair on the East coast of America. The most famous incumbent was Louis Kahn. He was there for 15 years. The person there before him was Le Ricolet – a theoretician – then it was Khan and then Joseph Rickwert. I’d already come to Penn – first thing I did 5 years ago was give lectures, in the physics, chemistry and biology department, cognitive science. No one from the architecture department had ever done that. That opened up thinking.  Then I formed the NSO having talked to the dean. I said why don’t we have some research here where the belief is that architecture needs more rigour – going back to the Greeks when there was rigour – and sciences have that as a given. Working along with scientific ideas will help. Also – and this was more of a gamble, maybe science can learn something from the synthesis that architects bring.

The Weave Bridge. A dramatic new bridge that links The University of Pennsylvania with its sports recreation ground

Before we talk about the ArcelorMittal Orbit, I wanted to talk about another project with Annish Kapoor. Together you have already completed one of the largest public arts projects in Britain called Temonos. What is it?
Temonos is one of five pieces in north-east England called the Teesside Giants. The idea was probably initiated four years ago. There were four or five big sites for urban regeneration: Darlington, Middlehaven, Middlesborough and Redcar. There were already master plans – huge ones – for schools and houses and developers were already in play. Each of them would bring attention to the region. And so the first was a bridge that was in Middlehaven. We were trying to get that ready for the Tall Ships race which ends there next year but that didn’t quite happen. So the next one that came up was the one in Middlesbrough, which we are working on now. The idea is still to go through with five sites, developing public art pieces for each of them over 15 years. If it completes it will be the biggest public art project in the UK, in terms of scope.

Temenos is a very strange piece in a way. It looks a bit like Marsyas, [the piece that Anish Kapoor and Balmond produced in the Tate Modern]. It’s an armature but it is also two rings raised into space – one elliptical and one circular. One is supported on a plinth and another one is hung from a mast. Soon on the Teesside skyline, you’ll find a circle hanging in space and a line juxtaposed against a circle and then you’ll see another circle 100m away. Only when you come close will you realize that they are connected by a wire.

How is it made?
The steel net starts at the rings – each cable is fixed 2.5m apart around the ring. The hoops, which keep the cables in place are about two or three metres away. The idea is that no one can climb on them. Middlesbrough Football Club stadium is nearby. You know after a match everyone will be challenged to climb that thing. We took a lot of care with health and safety, about not putting temptation in people’s way. Mind you, if someone wants to get there, they’re going to get there…

A rendering showing the Temenos project in Middlesbrough

In the middle of the piece the cables are close together. And so the cable net looks like a solid material in the middle but then it vanishes near to the rings. If you look at it obliquely it takes material shape; if you look at it square on – it’s whatever you see. When there’s rain on it and light catching it, it’s iridescent. It will play with the seasons and it will play with light.

Are the Teesside Giants designed to be a series?
There was a brief that they wanted some kind of single idea, but manifested differently because none of the mayors wanted anything that looked like what would be in the other towns. In the end it doesn’t have to come from one root idea. It would be nice but it doesn’t have to. I think the logic of the site will dictate that in a way. Teesside has a big engineering background. It’s a rugged landscape a massive horizontal landscape. Full of gantry cranes. I think they fit the tradition of the area. But they are art pieces as well.

Temonos under construction on Teesside.

When did you meet Anish Kapoor?
He phoned me up when he was awarded the Tate commission in early 2002. It was a big space and he’d only done studio work. He talked to some friends and someone said “you should work with Cecil” and we hit it off straight way. I liked the way he was thinking. We really are collaborators. Of course he gets more of the press because he is a famous artist. I liked the way he was always looking for something deeper in the form. Something intangible. I do that as well.

Tell us about Marsyas, the piece you made together for the Tate’s Turbine Hall.

At 140m, it spanned the entire length of the hall. It was 45m high and it was just 1mm of fabric. I’d never done a fabric structure before and I didn’t want to have the usual language of fabric, which you see all over – lots of wires holding the fabric up. You feel the tension pulling it. I wanted the fabric to be everything, so that you don’t see anything: look, no hands!

Marsyas in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern in 2002. Balmond’s first collaboration with Anish Kapoor

How important was it for you both?
With Marsyas; artists wrote about it as a great piece of art, architects thought of it as a great piece of architecture and the structural people said “my God how was that done?” In the end it transcends our own boundaries. Anish was working in small forms as a sculptor, working with smoothness. I was working with building frames and the logic of programmes. In the end, I think, it is beyond our disciplines.

It’s a crucible of invention. It’s a little research product. I have very few collaborators: I have Anish in the art world; then there’s Toyo Ito with whom I worked on theSerpentine Pavilion – a lovely subtle mind at work. And Rem Koolhaas – a Western product, a dynamo of invention, a very interesting mind.

How has it been working within the Olympics site?
Interesting. There’s a lot of politics. It’s a hugely risk-averse culture. People want to be sure it can happen and it will be built in time for the money we say it will be. So we have worked with a contractor in a consortium to try and make sure it can be done on time and within budget. We are applying for planning consent soon. We have done quite a bit of work on it to make sure it goes through all these bureaucratic gates; it wouldn’t have been announced otherwise. The Mayor can’t afford to announce something that wouldn’t happen. It’s also interesting having a sponsor. It’s the old way of working, having a patron. This time it is Mittal Steel. That’s not why we used steel actually. For a 200m-high structure on a minimum budget, you have to use steel.

A model of ArcelorMittal Orbit

What will it be like to visit?
It’s not just a tower to go up and have a look at London, although there are observations decks and eating facilities up there. We are trying to make it as good an experience as you can have – to go up through the piece. We are working on the feeling of entering it. It’s more than the object. It’s the experience of going there to get to the top. We’ll be on site in two months, so that’s what we are working on now: the little things that make all the difference.

Do you think it’s significant that the sponsor, the engineer and the artist are all from the Indian subcontinent?
It never occurred to me that we all had Asian roots. I’m a British citizen. I’ve been here for 40 years. Anish similarly. He went to school in India briefly but moved to London and I graduated here. It could’ve been another sponsor, it’s just the way it happened. I didn’t think about it until just before the press conference and I suddenly thought there will be a picture of three of us, grinning away.

That’s the beauty of Britain. It has assimilated us so completely. I feel at home here. Anish too. I’ve been tempted many times to move abroad in my career. People have tried to get me to go to other places. My wife’s American but I think this invention – British engineering, British architecture, British art – is very strong. I’m thrilled to be working in London for once. I’ve done all my work abroad – the concert halls, the bridges, everything – and it’s really nice to work in England again. I did a lot of work here in the Seventies but not really in the last 20 years.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Lakshmi Mittal - main sponsor of the structure, Anish Kapoor and at the far right Cecil Balmond

Why did you leave Sri Lanka?
I left because there were ethnic problems and my father was the wrong kind of mix. He was mixed race and Christian: part of the privileged minority that the British handed over to in 1948. My great-great grandfather was English. The Balmond name comes from Somerset. I did a genealogy search and there are hundreds of Balmond’s buried around Tiverton. My father went out with the railways in the mid-19th century and intermarried. And that’s why we are not pure race. As nationalism grew, those people were put under pressure: why were they privileged? Because they spoke good English. English is my mother tongue as Singhalese is. We spoke English at home but Singhalese elsewhere.

I was in university in Sri Lanka and I thought I needed to move so I went to Africa. I did half a degree in chemistry and mathematics in Nigeria. The most insightful teacher I ever had in mathematics was a Senegalese professor there. It was a crazy serendipitous thing. I was very lucky. My teachers in maths were always very gifted. I had a beautiful Indian teach me maths when I was younger.

When did you first come to Britain?
I came to Britain in 1963 and realised that I really wanted to go and work in Africa. I did my degree here and went back to Africa promptly, did three years there and then the Biafran War happened so I came back and joined Arup here, and did some postgraduate work at Imperial College.

What was Nigeria like?
It was a fantastic time to be in Nigeria. I had a real cultural awakening there. I grew up in an a very refined Asian culture – which is 3,000 years old. Nigeria was raw, powerful, drumming. It was the perfect age to be there. It was a great time in my life and I’ve kept my friends from then. It’s a shame it got so crazy there.

The left-wing politician and journalist Nick Auf der Maur notes this story in his book The Billion Dollar Game. The hard-drinking hack / politico tells a story of the blighted Montreal games of popular legend. Auf der Maur bewailed the way in which democratic systems in Montreal such as they were were circumvented. The Olympics to him were an event over which hung a pall of misfortune, such as suggested by the story above. To him Montreal was created by an egotistical tyrant of a mayor Jean Drapeau and an extravagant – and this is significant to Auf der Maur – French architect Roger Tallibert.

It is hard to reconcile Auf der Maur’s extraordinary exposé of the Montreal Olympics published before the Games were even held, with the joy of visiting a truly extraordinary spectacle in the east of the city. What is significant is that the stadium is still tabboo to some. This extravagant architectural gesture built by a duo who constantly compared their endeavour to the building of the Parthenon and the Pyramid deserves to be heralded not just on its own terms but as the first of a particular kind of Grand Projet that defined the late 20^th century – formally and structurally extravagant and legible primarily as a gesture rather than as a building. It is more Calatrava than Calatrava and a very obvious result of the unfettered ambitions of Tallibert and Drapeau that even later apologists for the Games acknowledge was out of control.

And yet reading the book in the CCA archive, just hours afer having visited the megrastructure – a pool, inclined tower, stadium and velodrome in one – one realises that a narrative arcs particular to the Olympic Games defines our appreciation of the archtiecture the Games produces. Montreal defined a narrative of Olympic Games, which subsequent Organising committees have done their best to control.  Disapproval and dischord prior to the Games as costs shoot up for as yet unseen buildings. This is then followed by an alloyed appreciation of them during or immediately after the Games themselves.

In terms this is then followed by the legacy phase. This is typified by various state figures and critics engaging in intederminate economic arguments as to the true cost and benefit of the event in the aftermath which ultimately are irreducable to a result. How does one ultimately quantify the economic benefit resulting from an ill-defined changed in global perception of a place? Observing the 2008 Games in Beijing, one could see this arc established by Montreal followed closely. London is slipping into this pattern as well. The only thing that has changed is that the story is anticipated and managed in a much more ruthless fashion than it was during Montreal.

In the CCA Library is also a book by the novelist  and Professor of English Jack Ludwig called Five Ring Circus. It tells the story of the construction of the buildings through the actual event itself. Recording the opening ceremony in florid style Ludwig notes. “The Olmpics were all set to begin. With an unfinished tower. With temporary ramps and walks and staircases, wooden flooring that boinged under bodyweight and looked at  closely showed in spaces between boards an unbridled  prosepct of ground 30 or 40 or 50 fee below. A strong fresh smell of epoxy, the bonding material used to join the block in Roger Tallibert’s building plan, charged the air with an effluvium of newness.’

To Ludwig, the failure to complete the building on schedule becomes part of the pageantry of the Games. The extraordinary political battle taking place over who was responsible for failing to deliver the project on time and overspending is part of the spectacle of the event. Construction, even incomplete construction is part of the Olympic experience. There have been no greater failures in Olympic history than the failure to complete the inclining tower over the Montreal Stadium, but Ludwig reconciles this with the performances of the Romanian gymanst Nadia Comaneci and the German swimmer Kornelia Ender and pretty much shrugs it off.

For Ludwig, the spend on the Games is melioriated by its quixotic, almost poetic effect on Montreal, which becomes in his eyes forever touched by the Olympic spirit. Structures may not be finished, doping may take place but the Games took place. “In time Kornelia Ender’s every motion became part of a unique signature on Montreal space,” he says. Although the book is published in the same year as Auf Der Maur’s, the narrative has changed utterly simply becaue the book takes place after an incredibly successful event. Ludwig is able to cast his eye forwards to the future as well. ‘No matter what happens to Montreal … as result of the Olympic deficit, Drapeau will always believe that he was after all right.’

When asked by Nixon what he thought the impace of the French Revolution would be the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said it was “too early to say”. It has taken Paul Charles Howell a planning consultant and key player in the Montreal Olympic Organizing Committee some 33 year to finally put his thoughts on the event out into the world in his book The Montreal Olympics: An Insider’s View of Organizing A Self-Financing Games. By now he feels able to show that in terms of organsiation the Games were in fact a success.

Howell posits the fact that what is termed Olympic defecit was in fact cost. Explaining away Drapeau’s promise to make the Games self-financing, he suggests the figure of $2bn, commonly described as a defecit after the Games is inaccurate because it involves costs such as the completion of the stadium, the later conversions to the buildings and the cost of constructing the Olympic village without taking into account its resale.

The book redresses the balance to a degree pointing out how well used the facility is but it is far from conclusive. Howell overlooks the interminable problem with the stadium’s roof and although he states the benefits that have accrued to Montreal in as persuasive a way as possible, he admits ultimately however that his account-balancing is futile. One has to believe in the Olympic goals of excellence and fraternity through competition to acknowledge the benefits. One senses today that there is no sense of shared ownership of the stadium, which is although not for the delicate or faint of heart a truly remarkable piece of architecture.

These three books in different ways suggest that the political faultlines between city, state and federal government as well as the International Olympic Committee that existed during the mayorship of Drapeau, and were frequently manipulated by him, perhaps still endure. It is possible however, for greatness to exist in this internecine atmosphere and for the various viewpoints on the Games to be right and yet somehow miss the point. To an untutored observer, Montreal possesses a certain romantic sense of ambition, thwarted in part, attained in others that is peculiar to an Olympic city. But then that self-same untutored observer could also be the kind of person that finds the sight of his fellow countryman’s name inscribed onto a wall, surprisingly moving.

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.

The Modern Olympic movement’s fascination with it is based on a misinterpretration of the Ancient Games. Because most of our understanding of the Ancient Olympics comes from statuary and poetry, it was believed by Baron de Coubertin that they should somehow feature as competitive elements. Indeed it was only at the very end of the Olympics lifespan that poetry was introduced and only then in very dubious circumstances. In A.D. 67  Emperor Nero, who was devoted to Greek culture, visited Olympia and took part in the Olympics. He took part in the Chariot races and although he fell off his Chariot, still got awarded first prices for all the events, by the judges, which when he was murdered in Rome a year later were taken away from him and his records were erased as if he never participated in the Olympic Games in Olympia at all.

The reason we know about Nero’s antics was because he added poetry to the roster of events that received medals. And the poetry that was written and commended invariably described and praised Nero’s aggrandising actions.

When Baron De Coubertin revived the Olympic Games, he was dedicated to art being included in the modern Games but was only able to do so for the Stockholm Games in 1912 when he finally convinced organisers to include medal competitions should be held in the fields of art and poetry. However, the Swedish Royal Academy and Society of Arts rejected the idea of a competition, explaining: ‘with regard to a competition in painting or sculpture … the principal motive is, purely and simply – art’. Their inference was that here art was being co-opted at the service of promoting an ideology.

Their concerns were borne out by the awarding of the gold medal for poetry to the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, for his frankly rubbish ‘Ode to Sport’.  The first stanza of which runs:

O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life.
You appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing
Which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence,
Like the radiant messenger of a past age,
When mankind still smiled.

From then on the Olympics movement has always tried to co-opt art for propaganda or PR purposes.

As Gompertz mentioned on Today this morning, medals were handed out for art, but only in the seven Games held between 1912 and 1948. After the London Games in 1948 they were stopped. The unedifying site of gold and bronze medal being handed out to two different proposals for sports complexes in rural Finland in the town-planning category at the London 1948 Games was perhaps not what subsequent Games organisers wished to repeat. Yes, art and the Olympics co-exist but glancing through the medal winners, there is only perhaps two works of art worth savouring and these are both on a sporting theme. Indeed sport as a theme is obviously ubiquitous and ultimately unsatisfactory.

As the century progressed however, with art asserting its autonomy from the state ofr from ideological imperatives particularly from the 1960s onwards, the relationship grew farcical. The mutually unsatisfactory relationship could not have been made more clear than during the Corridart debacle at Montreal in 1972 when the Cultural Olympiad was torn down days before the Olympics because the Mayor felt it didn’t portray the city in a good light.

As Christian Redfern has expertly explained in Canadian Art, the aim of Corridart was to link the city to the Olympic site. The idea was that along the 5.5 km Sherbrooke Street the artist and architect Melvin Charney with a modest budget even then of $386,000 would turn the street itself into an art happening. “All along the route were sections of bright yellow scaffolding that held photographs showing the history of the street and its people. Large orange hands attached to the scaffolding pointed at galleries, architecture and other permanent Montreal landmarks. Inserted into this streetscape were 50 to 60 art installations and two stages that were scheduled to host over 700 performances,” she writes. Art works responded directly to the city. 

(Interestingly some terrible proposals are in existence for London 2012 in which  screens will stand along the road from Aldgate to Stratford which blatantly shield the visitor from parts of London deemed unpalatable by visitors. The exact obverse of Corridart. )

The noble intention of the Corridart exhibition however was to bring art to the city and highlight the value of the city itself to both visitors of the inhabitants itself. Riffing on a painting in the National Gallery in which an Iroquois points out to Samuel de Champlain where he ought to found Montreal, Corridart featured a number of Mickey Mouse hands pointing out famous institutions and landmarks. Unbelievably these very institutions, including the art galleries, objected. Drapeau declared that he was ‘shocked’ ‘humiliated’ and ‘insulted’ by the event. Charney believes that by its very nature of showing the city as it was and celebrating it as it was, the art got in the way of the real event and the grand-standing of the mayor.

Charney told Redfern: “The whole show was put up with the cooperation of the city of Montreal. City representatives were sitting on all the main committees. It was up for a week before it came down. What is interesting to me is when it came down. It came down right before the Olympics opened. So what one saw in the newspapers you saw “Corridart” coming down and the Olympic flag going up. And Drapeau was back in the news, four months after having the Olympics taken away from him.” Since that time the Cultural Olympiad has operated as PR for the Olympics pure and simple.

As far as London is concerned things aren’t much clearer. Evan Davis tried to ascertain this important definition on the Today progame this morning. “What is the Cultural Olympiad?” he asked. Tony Hall, the chair of the Cultural Olympiad board replies: “The Cultural Olympiad is something that we said we’d do after the Beijing Games. It’s been a programme up and down the country involving people in small ways and some big ways in cultural and artistic activity.” Which is as clear as mud. I would argue – as a fan of the Olympics as an event – that the Cultural Olympiad, is effectively UK arts funding redeployed to promote the Olympic Games and I would further argue that history has shown us that art, as distinct from graphic design or architecture, has no place in the Modern Olympics.

Images contained are of work that featured in Corridart. Most of it was destroyed.

The modern Olympics was founded in order to ammeliorate moral values across society and it has always called on the sacred role of the Ancient Games as justification for doing so. Of course, social values have changed since 1896 and different organisers have latched onto different aspects of the game and bent it to their will.  But quoting visually from the ancient Games is a constant.

This is why the Star Trek analogy is important for the torch relay, which we happily mistake for an ancient one. I have mentioned the pseudo-pagan quality of the ceremony in my previous post and how it contrasted with the overt display of Germany’s manufacturing capabilities in the design of the torch. Indeed one of the the magnesium-fueled torches devices was used to ignite a blast furnce in Essen – a direct connection between the torch and German industrial power. The British though must be responsible for creating this tradition by picking up on the torch as symbol not just of technological prowess of the host nation but fire power as well.

In visual terms the torch of 1948 was the perfect example of the British snatching back their ownership of classical civilisation. Ralph Lavers was the perfect candidate to design the torch for 1948. An architect but also an archaelogist of some renown, Lavers took inspiration from classic Greek and Roman lamps. On the other hand, the torch was the acme of contemporary techological inventiveness.

According to The Official Report  of The Organising Committee For The XIV Olympiad, The Fuel Research Station of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was founded during the First World War was asked to design a suitable container and to recommend a fuel by the Organising Committee. The Fuel Research Station decided to use hexamine in tablet form as the fuel, housed in a perforated canister. In order to make the flame from the hexamine luminous, 6 per cent naphthalene was incorporated in the tablets. Air holes were put in the fuel canister so that, even in a strong wind, the fuel would last for that time. Make no mistake. It was designed to present Britain as a technoglically advanced nation.

The Report is drenched with the rhetoric of technological pride. It recounts that:  “to ensure economy of production, the size of tablets had to be similar to those in commercial production, but these were not large enough to ensure the required burning time if all in the fuel pack were lit on ignition. Eight tablets were therefore placed on a central rod, the bottom three being carried in a cup in the holder; as the top tablets burnt away, these were gradually fed up by a spring. To keep the fuel, which readily absorbed moisture, dry under all weather conditions it had to be kept in an airtight pack which would burn completely, leaving no residue to choke the air holes in the canister. A thin nitro-cellulose casing to hold the eight tablets was specially made for the purpose.”

In addition, the British added the tradition of improving the theatrical potential of the final torch: the one that is carried by the final runner in the Stadium and used to light the Olympic Flame. In 1948 the organising committee opted for a magnesium flame in order for it to be seen across the Stadium, even in sunlight. Carrying burning magnesium obviously requires an added degree of protection, and a stainless steel holder was therefor required. This also was designed by Mr. Lavers and made by E.M.I. Factories, Ltd. The candle, which was designed to burn for ten minutes, was supplied by Wessex Aircraft Engineering Co. Ltd which had provided wind direction smoke generators to the British military during the Second World War.

As with the torch relay as a whole, what began as a piece of Nazi propaganda, became in the hands of the British, a tradition. Successive torch relays have used this means of simultaneously showing off their industrial capabilities and finding a way of reinvigorating a toga-clad charade invented by a Nazi with a Jewish wife. The ceremony of the relay became an important means of establishing the Games as an event with roots in the birth of civilisation. However the Torch – in strong contrast – had to be radically reinvented every four years to highlight the relevance of the event. It was the one object that had to be updated. By the time the Winter Games kicked off, twice every four years. In 1960, for the Squaw Valley Winter Games, the torch was designed by John Hench who won an Oscar for Best Special Effect for developing the hydraulic giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

For the 1988 Seoul Games, the Korea Explosive Co., Ltd were given the job of making over 3,300 torches. 3 different designer submitted 13 different designs to the organising committee which eventually chose a Brazier submitted by Prof. Lee Woo-song of Sookmyung Women’s University. In addition mobile cauldrons in which the flame would lie in state overnight during the torch relay were created. The cauldrons, 1.65m high and nearly1m in diameter, used propane gas as fuel and had a strong resistance to wind and rain. The cauldron could be fixed on to ships and could remain burning at speeds of up to 30 knots an hour. South Korea is not just a place where cheap watches are made, was the not-too-subtle claim of the torch. We make series bits of kit here.

But the technological claim of the torch was not always pre-eminent in later Games. Other symbolic claims where made by later torch designs. In 1992, for the Barcelona Games, Andre Ricard who designed coffee machines for Gaggia and Moka created the torch. Whereas Seoul at the time wanted to highlight South Korea’s role as a technical innovator rather than just a place where cheap electrical goods were knocked out, the Barcelona Games were part of an attempt to return the city to the pantheon of great European cities.The general effect of the Barcelona torch was to convey to the viewer that the city was a stylish place – the kind of place you might drink an espresso at a pavement café. It looks like the kind of bottle-opener you’d buy for the man who has everything.

The Winter Games however, have attracted the most outrageous and overtly propagandist of torch designs. The French hired Philippe Starck to design a typically phallic effort for Albertville in 1992. The torch for Lillehammer meanwhile was extremely thin so it wouldn’t go out when it was delivered in dramatic fashion by a ski-jumper. Best of all was the torch for the Turin Games in 2006, designed by Pininfarina, the famous car design company. Overseen by Andrea Pininfarina the chief executive of the company himself, a legendary designer who also worked on the Ferrari Enzo supercar as well as less exciting car designs for Hyundai, Daewoo and Ford, the design was inspired by both a ski and a mountain peak. The torch was around 2.3kg -well over twice the weight of the torch for the Beijing Games. Each athlete who carried it, felt the burden of showing the world how dynamic Turin’s automobile design industry was. Pininfarina himself would die two years after the games when he was knocked off his Vespa by an elderly driver who failed to cede right of way.

During their dig the two British archaeologists found a rock upon which was carved with a familir five-ringed insignia. The implications of their discovery of the Olympic rings at such an ancient site were surely huge. Until that time, it was commonly held that Pierre de Coubertin, the French pedagogue and founder of the Modern Olympics, had invented the insignia in 1912. Had the two British archaeologists discovered that the ancient Greeks and not Coubertin had come up with the five-ring device?

No they hadn’t. What the discovery did reveal was the degree to which the Olympic movement is based on the constant reinvention and restaging of our Classical past. The Torch Relay best illustrates this. The Germans invented this theatrical set piece, would be the British who would revive it in 1948 and turn it into one of the most precious of Olympic theatrical set pieces. It would also be the British which in 2008 would ultimately succumb to the racist proposition inherent in the event. With their focus on the ancient world, the British archaeologists had overlooked more recent events.

In 1934, the German sports administrator Carl Diem had visited ancient sites in Greece in his capacity as an organiser of the 1936 Olympic Games. Diem was one of the founding fathers of the Olympic movement. In 1906 Diem, then a middle-distance runner, had led out the German athletes at the so-called Intercalated Olympic Games, a commemoration of the first games held in 1896 but not an Olympics proper. From that time on, Diem had pursued the goal of hosting the Olympics in Germany. As part of the German Sports Authority for Athletics he received a promise from the International Olympic Committee that the Games would be held in Berlin in 1916. The First World War confounded his ambition and Germany was excluded from the Olympic movement in the 1920s. Diem however stuck doggedly to his task and in May 1932, again largely due to the reputation and lobbying efforts of Diem, Berlin was selected to host the 1936 summer games and Diem named as Secretary General of the Organizing Committee. Winning the chance to stage the games in his home was not however Diem’s greatest challenge.

In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Initially, he was a critic of the Olympic movement. He asserted as late as 1932 that the Olympic movement was in the thrall of ‘Jews and freemasons.’ The Games were suspect and so was Diem whose wife was Jewish. In addition his assistant Theodor Lewald had a Jewish grandmother on his father’s side. And yet it was Diem and Lewald who convinced Goebbels that the iconography of the modern Games could promote one of the tenets of the Nazi theory of European history. These two sports administrators were aware that the German fascists linked their concept of the idealised German racial type with the Ancient Greeks. Hitler claimed that the Dorian tribe which had migrated into Greece from the north was of German origin; Nazi Germany in adopting neo-Dorian architecture was returning to its roots, he claimed. Goebbels hailed the Acropolis as the cradle of Germanic culture. In his book Olympia 1936, Nazi propagandist Willi Koenitzer asserts that Hercules the mythical founder of the ancient games belonged to the ‘nordic tribe of the Dorians.’

To persuade the Nazis of the merits of staging the Games, Diem needed to capture their imagination; better yet, he needed a coup de theatre, the Nazis themselves having staged many on the road to power. The idea of the Olympic Torch Relay was born. It was meant to express the migration of racial and cultural superiority from Ancient Greece to modern Germany. The theatre and symbolism of the torch relay is well known now, largely because it has been adapted and re-used throughout successive Olympic Games. In the 1930s, Diem had no model for the relay. He would have been aware that in the compound in Olympia where the main Games were held there was an eternal flame. It was kept burning in honour of the Greek goddess of the hearth Hestia and was used to light all the other sacrificial fires throughout the complex of temples around the original Olympic site. In addition, some ancient Greek cities features torch races as part of their local festivals. But within the highly religious and ceremonial Games of Ancient Greece there was no torch relay. Diem synthesised the relay from ancient texts with the goal of promoting German racial supremacy either overtly or through the supposed kinship with Ancient Greece.

The lighting ceremony is illustrative. Fifteen Greek women dressed in rough serge smocks entered the ruins of the ancient stadium at Olympia on July 20 1936. They gathered round a modern glass reflector made by the famous German firm Zeiss Optics which focused the heat of the noonday sun on a fagot topped with flammable material. They carried the torch to a German-made oil-filled brazier and chanted Pindar’s Olympic Hymn. This ceremony, mistaken in the the popular imagination for an ancient one, is still enacted every four years. The pseudo-paganism of the ceremony was underwritten the overt display of Germany’s manufacturing capabilities – the magnesium-fueled torches were constructed by the munitions manufacturer Krupp who would soon be an integral part of the German war effort. After lighting the torch in Olympia, Diem planned a short detour to the west of Athens to Delphi for another ceremony in the ancient stadium on Mount Parnussus.

As Olympic scholar Robert Barney writes: ‘Among Diem’s contrived theatrical props for the stadium ceremonies at Delphi was a rectangular, dressed block of stone, some 3 feet high. Etched into each of the four sides of the stone was chiselled the modern Olympic 5 ring symbol. The stone was placed on the ancient starting groove structures near the sphendome. After the ceremonies were concluded the torch runners departed for points north. But the stone remained in placed on the ancient starting line sills… for years.’ It was this stone that the British archaeologists discovered.

If only these archaeologists, whose names Barney does not record, had watched the film Olympia. Director Leni Riefenstahl’s film is a documentary of the Berlin games – and so much more. If the film is remembered today it is becaue of its use of the human body as a site for fascist propaganda, but Olympia has also done much to entrench the idea that the torch relay, and many other aspects of the modern Olympics are ancient traditions when in fact they are pieces of theatre designed to establish the Games in modern culture. In the opening section of the film the very stone that the archaeologists ‘discovered’ can be seen. Proof of an ancient past the rings? The rings were merely a prop in a film. The influence of Riefenstahl’s film on the Olympic movement can be seen in the manner that she was awarded special acknowledgement at the subsequent Games. The post-war Games continued the tradition of the torch relay, establishing this piece of Nazi propaganda as an integral part of the iconography of the Olympics. It is all the more astonishing given the fact that the next Olympic Games after Berlin were held 12 years and a world war later, in London. Surely the fact that the British had fought the Nazis for longer than any other nation during the Second World War they would have found the propaganda of Torch Relay repellent? But the British Olympic Association had other ideas.They retained the Torch relay and reinvented it for their own purposes.

Olympia has been controversial since it was first shown. Riefenstahl was at the very least a Nazi sympathizer. Originally she had trained as a dancer and worked for theatre impressario Max Reinhardt. She injured her knee in 1924 and became fascinated by film, particularly nature documentaries set in the Alps. She went on to direct a feature called Das Blaue Licht, a mysticised crypto-Wagnerian tale of a free spirited woman called Junta who lives on a mountain.

Riefenstahl herself played the part of Junta and the film featuers amazing sequences of her climbing mountainscapes, like those painted by Casper David Friedrich but in the moonlight. In one memorable sequence she is pursued in a mountain climb by a potential suitor whose limbs continually stretch out to make the ascent but also to reach the unattainable goal of the free spirited Junta – physical prowess in the pursuit of an ideal. Hitler was an admirer of the work. In 1932 though she heard Hitler speak and became an adherent. She wrote of the experience: “I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth”. She asked to meet Hitler and was offered the job of filming a rally at Nuremberg in 1933. Hitler liked her film enough to ask her to record another rally in Nuremberg in 1934. The result is The Triumph of the Will, a film stylised to the point of sculpture and a clear piece of Nazi propaganda. Olympia is often similarly dismissed but the film is more problematic and there are some that argue it transcends politics and is a work of art. Diem created the Torch Relay but it was Riefenstahl who imprinted it on our collective subconscious. Seen through her camera, the torch relay plays a couple of clever tricks on the viewer.

For the first time, the Games are no longer located in a single auditorium, we see their effect spilling out over Europe and the Olympic movement becomes a cause shared with the whole world. Diem successfully associated the Olympic spirit with Nazi goals. But once the Third Reich had fallen the Olympic genie was out of the bottle. To continue to exist it had to do more than simply animate an arena once every four years. That was surely what the founders would have wanted but in doing so, subsequent leaders of the Olympic movement paid a huge price. In Riefenstahl’s film the first change-overs are shown taking place in Greece. Riefenstahl uses a map of Europe to show the route of the torch. The terrain of Bulgaria gives way to a painted suggestion of Sofia. Belgrade in Yugoslavia appears as a city painted on the Danube. The cities become more fully depicted and illustrated as the torch gets closer to its destination. The camera flies over the bridges of Budapest. Cities cling to glistening rivers. The camera enters Vienna through a beautifully juxtaposed series of statues and art nouveau gates before heading onto the open plane in which Berlin stands. A stylised abstract Europe. Yet, as the writer Ian Sinclair has noted, ‘The map montage in which the torch crosses Europe, Olympia to Berlin, is like an invasion rehearsal.’

Riefenstahl’s camera accompanied the torch from Olympia all the way to Berlin. She would have seen the crowds in Vienna who greeted the flame in what was to all intents and purposes a Nazi rally. The crowds sang the Horst Wessel Lied as the torch arrived. She would have heard them sing the words that translated mean: ‘Clear the streets for the brown battalions / Clear the streets for the stormtroopers! / Already millions look with hope to the swastika / The day of freedom and bread is dawning!” Two years before the Anschluss that forcibly united Germany and Austria, the torch’s journey inspired what was to all and intents and purposes a Nazi in the heart of the Vienna. Although an early Nazi supporter, the right wing politician Vice-Chancellor Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg had grown disillusioned. When the torch arrived in Vienna, he was the second most powerful man in Austria, a nationalist but one who was fighting to keep Austria an independent state. He was fervently opposed Austrian Nazis and their support of a union with Germany. He conveyed the torch into a city that he was losing control of. ‘When I reached the Ringstrasse, I felt I should never get through. The path had narrowed still further. The light of the streetlamps fell upon faces filled with hatred and distorted by shouting.’ Goebbels demanded that this should be played down. ‘The use of the Olympic flame for political purposes is exceptionally regrettable,’ he said.

The montage sequence in which painted backdrops evoke Eastern European capital cities, elides this episode. The lingering shots that revel on the beauty of the athletes’ body make a strange claim: you are watching art, it says, not sport, and not politics. It removes the political context and replaces it instead with the aesthetics of the body beautiful. The film montages a link between the statuary of Ancient Greece and the figure of the contemporary athlete. This had long been done in print form, particularly in the official posters of the Olympic Games. The poster for the 1924 Games in Paris shows contemporary athletic figures emerging from a laurel wreath in the pose of ancient statues. The most telling moment comes when an image of the Discobolus of Myron bleeds into a shot of the German decathlete Erwin Huber in action. The Discobolus of Myron was cast in bronze around 460-450 BC. It is known mainly though Roman copies, most famously the Palombara Discobolus which is a copy of Myron’s original bronze made in the first century AD; it was the first copy of this famous sculpture to have been discovered, in 1781. So taken with it was Hitler, he negotiated to buy the statue from the Italians in 1937. In 1938 Galeazzo Ciano, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sold it to him for five million lire, over the protests of Giuseppe Bottai, Minister of Education, and the scholarly community. It was shipped by rail to Munich and displayed in the Glyptothek.

Olympia plays a double role. On the surface, the sequence creates an innocent link between sport, its timelessness and its communal aspect. However, in doing so, the film encourages the viewer to enjoy the spectacle of sport aesthetically rather than interpreting it politically. This elision explains why commentators often find Riefenstahl’s film a problem. She convinces us that what we are looking at is art rather than a report of a sporting competition or a documentary about a politically charged event. She makes us think we are engaging in an aesthetic act. What she is in fact doing is encourgaing the viewer to enjoy the body as a political ideal. The pastoral tone of the section in the athletes’ village, with naked hunks in a sauna, is not simply a sweat-sleek lesson in body fascism. It’s a moment of seduction, a means of convincing us that Olympianism is not a political movement or a movement that can been co-opted for political reasons but an aesthetic movement with its roots in pre-history. It is propaganda of a new, insidious variety. It should be remembered that at the time of the making of the film the Nazis were not preoccupied with agressiviely promoting their ideology as an international threat. Indeed in the face of a potential boycott by the United States Athlets Federation, Carl Diem and his assistant Lewald with their Jewish connections were used to persuade the world the purpose of the Olympics was to convince the World that the Nazis meant no harm. Throughout the Games, anti-semitic signage was removed and propaganda was suppressed. The Nazi regime apologised for the way in which the torch became imbroiled in the rally in Vienna.

As far as Goebbels was concerned Olympia was not propagandist enough. He rejected the first cut of the film and according to Riefenstahl herself, Olympia was only rescued by her direct request to Hitler who sanctioned the cut that Riefenstahl delivered. Given the degree to which Diem’s set piece was an expression of Nazi self-image, one would expect 1936 to be the beginning of the Torch Relay rather than the end. After the war Riefenstahl might have been in disgrace, but Olympia’s imagery remained potent. Minutes of the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games 1948 recorded that: ‘Despite the unpleasant associations with Nazi propaganda, the London committee decided that the torch relay was a ‘tradition’ and as such worth keeping.’ It wasn’t a tradition, and its orgins lay in Nazi propaganda. In terms of Olympic pageantry and propaganda, it is the great question: why did the British Olympic committee choose to keep the Torch Relay? Some indication remains from the debate that took place in 1948 over who was to carry the torch into Wembley on its final journey. As Bob Philips has recorded in his book The 1948 Olympics: How London Rescued the Games, a leader writer in The Times, related : “ even among those who have not become, to use an almost unavoidable phrase, Olympic-minded, there is one event in the Games which as captured the imagination, the carrying of the lighted torch from distant Olympia to the Stadium at Wembley.’ The article concluded that there was only one individual that the country wanted to see finishing the Relay. Sydney Wooderson, although he had recently retired, was Britain’s most famous track athlete; a former record holder in the 800 yards and the mile and winner of the 800m and the 5000m at the European Championships in 1946. Wooderson had been told he would be granted this honour. However, unbeknownst to him, the organising committee of the Olympic Games had decided he wasn’t appropriate and had approached John Mark, an athlete who was not even in the British team. He was, however, a president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club, as had been Lord Burghley, who was the chairman of the London Olympic Games Organising Committee. And he was also tall and blond, physically almost identical to the athlete who had run the final length of the Berlin torch relay. Wooderson was small, balding and bespectacled and as Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother put it at the time, ‘we couldn’t have had poor little Sydney doing it’.

The organisers of the London event were seduced by Riefenstahl’s imagery. The British establishment, whose values informed the Olympic movement at an early stage, were no strangers to co-opting the iconography of the classical athletic form. The frenchman Baron de Coubertin, ostensible founder of the modern Olympics had closely studied the English public school system, whose values in academic terms were founded upon the studying of the classics, Ancient Greek and Latin, and in extra-curricula terms on collective physical endeavor, particularly through sport. The London Olympics of 1948, were a determined attempt to reassert Britain’s inheritance of Classicism. The official poster of the event superimposes a figure of Hitler’s cherished Discobolus of Myron on to an image of Big Ben. After the war the Palombara Discobolus was taken from the Germans and returned to Rome. At this point, and thanks to the British, the Discobolus assumes a political aspect which must have operated on an almost subconscious level. The Palombara Discobulus was not the only version of the statue in circulation. In 1790 a second copy of the sculpture had been excavated at Hadrian’s Villa. English connoisseur Charles Townley bought the statue soon after and had the head restored, wrongly as it turned out. The head of the discus thrower in the Townley Discobulus faces the opposite way to the original and other Roman copies such as the Palombara.

The Townley Discobolus though became the British Discobolus when in the late 18th century, it was bought by the British Museum where it still stands today. It was also this version of the statue that was drawn as the poster of the London Games. We often think of the period immediately after the Second World War as a time of unbridled modernity. We think of Attlee’s government and its great reforming programme. We also think of the Festival of Britain in 1951 in which architects and designers expressed their vision of a modern democratic nation. In the 1948 Olympics by contrast we see the British establishment re-asserting its ownership of antiquity after an unseemly spell when the Germans had co-opted it. The British restaged the Nazi-created ceremony because they understood the signficance of controlling antiquity. Although it was drawing to a close by 1948, the Empire was founded on the ideals of sound administrative skills developed through the programmatic study of classical languages paired with athleticism undertaken in a collective fashion. Watching the film of the Torch Relay in 1948, made some 12 years after Riefenstahl’s film took these images to the World for the first time, one can see the British establishment reacquainting itself with its own self-created lineage back to Ancient Greece. The film is much shorter, less comprehensive than Riefenstahl’s. It does without the extravagant opening sequence whose visuals carried the argument of the Games as being outside history and politics.

But then it doesn’t need to make that case. Diem’s ceremony and Riefenstahl’s film has already done it well enough. The Ancient Games were an integral part of a religious festival. Athletes and spectators communed with the gods through performing and witnessing great athletic feats. The Modern Games meanwhile are enjoyed with individuals with a differing set of beliefs. Part of the essential programme of every one of the Modern Olympics games is to reinvent the idea behind a production called The Olympic Games. This was a film of the 1948 relay is shot on colour rather than black and white film. It restages the theatrical events, the lighting of the torch and the scenes of semi-naked men running through ruins. One shot shows a figure almost obscured by the dusk carrying a torch through the hills of Greece. It is Riefenstahl redux and reduced –a sleight-of-hand using the iconography of the Games.

All images are from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and feature in the left hand corner a reflection of the lamp in my front room.

A plan to ban fireworks from the Opening Ceremony of the games, prompted IOC President Jacques Rogge into prolonged reminiscence about a salutary tale from the annals of Olympic history. Rogge, one of the rare members of the IOC to think historically when faced with a new challenge, went back to the Opening Ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Games, when the Olympic Cauldron was lit at the beginning of the Games by three athletes who rose on a hydraulic platform to an elevated cauldron sitting high above the stadium in Seoul. Doves which had just been released were still wheeling in the stadium. Some had come to settle on the cauldron towards which the athletes were rising with torches held aloft.

Rogge recalled what happened next – a sight that was visible to over 1 billion people who were watching the event on television. “The doves went in the cauldron and tens of doves were burned alive and there was a lot of emotion from the World Wildlife Fund and animal protection and the IOC decided no doves would be released any more,” he said.

(If you can’t stand the suspense go to 4:50 for the frying.)

Watching the footage again, one can’t help but feel a tad sorry for the IOC. Most of the birds wisely fly away at the first sign of the torches, but a conspicuous and in must be said utterly stupid, handful of pigeons, fail inexplicably to flee and are clearly cooked. It’s like watching a strangely ostentatious and particularly cruel barbecue – a piece of culinary barbarism that rendered pointless the protracted efforts made by Seoul’s civic authorities to suppress the eating of dog amongst its populace during the Games for fear of upsetting the foreigners.

Yet the releasing of doves had been part of the games since the Antwerp Games in 1920 as a commemoration for those who had died in the First World war. Originally the Games had been planned for Budapest but following hostilities the Hungarians were stripped of the event. Furthermore, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey were also banned from competing in the Games. The doves commemorated those that had died fighting on the side of the victors. It was only subsequently the gesture came to signify in the IOC’s parlance peace between nations, regardless of their role in specific conflagrations. In a piece of post-rationalisation the doves became intertwined with the tradition found in the ancient Games of their existing for the duration of the Games a truce between the warring cities of Greece. (A tradition which was often ignored.) However in 1920 the Germans, along with their allies were not allowed to attend the Olympic Games under pressure from the French. Peace amongst nations indeed. Typically for Olympic pageantry, this celebratory gesture, so quickly adopted and more often than not belying a more complex political reality, is hard for us to let go of. The Paloma de la Paz (pictured above) was used as an unofficial mascot at the Games of 1968 in Mexico. Some still consider it as a fig-leaf to cover the Tlatelolco massacre , a government assault on predominantly student protestors in the host city, which left hundreds dead. At the very least it is a sop to it.

After, the decision was made to stop the simultaneous release of doves with the lighting of cauldrons, the image of the dove persisted for a good while longer in Olympic imagery. Live doves were released at the 1992 Opening Ceremony in Barcelona, but this had to be done several hours before the flame was lit. Later opening ceremonies show that it took the Olympic movement a while to kick their dove habit. Balloon doves were released in 1994 at the Lillehammer Winter Games and paper doves were used at the Atlanta Ceremonies in 1996.

Indeed the pageantry of The Games which predominantly developed in an ad hoc fashion between the wars, is now becoming virtual. When the Sri Lankan National Olympic Committee president Hemasiri Fernando says the extensive use of fireworks during the ceremonies causes a potential polluting effect, one can’t help remember the stunning sequence of firework footprints during the opening ceremony for the Beijing games.

After over-hearing an animator boasting in a bar, a reporter for China’s Beijing Times revealed days later that the sequence had not actually happened. Around three billion people watched the animation believing that a series of giant footprints created by fireworks had proceeded through the night sky from Tiananmen Square to the Bird’s Nest stadium and had been filmed from above by a helicopter. A fallacy as it turned out.

So whilst the reason to get rid of fireworks is ostensibly their perceived environmental threat – “we all have the responsibility to protect this earth and the fireworks have a tremendous effect on the environment,” says Fernando – this feeds into a greater faith in the virtual. Indeed, the perniciousness of fireworks to plant and animal life is largely unproven. It seems more about controlling the kind of complexity that sees doves accidentally fried than anything else. The fact that Danny Boyle the artistic director of the opening ceremony for London 2012 has affirmed his faith in the performance being a live one, is only partially reassuring.

As the consequence of the steady inflation of expectation when it comes to ceremonies and the need to control the chaos, the 21^st century has seen the rise of the professional Ceremony producer. Hamish Hamilton, who will work alongside Boyle in the organisation of the London 2012 ceremonies made his name directing events such as the MTV and BRITs. This year he directed the half-time show for the Super Bowl and the Oscars. These two events are ostensibly live events but have become far more emphatically television events; largely augmented by film or TV footage.

Beijing was the first time the International Olympics Committee employed its own broadcaster to provide full coverage of the sport and ceremonies to different channels around the world. London will be the second time. No pigeons will be hurt during the opening ceremony but then the fireworks may have to be faked. It seems strange that the sport being celebrated is so unpredictable but the ceremonies themselves are controlled to the point where parts of them no longer exist in any material way.

Giovanna Mazotti was voted Miss Italy in 1952 winning the right to represent her country at that year’s Miss Universe competition, which was eventually won by Miss Finland. Upon returning home, Miss Italy  told a Rome newspaper that the Miss Universe contest was rigged in favor of Finland as a publicity stunt for the Summer Olympics. “Why not call her ‘Miss Olympic’ if publicity for the Olympic games is the object?”

As we get close to 2012 and as we contemplate the Tories cuts in the budget of the Arts Council of England, – the Guardian estimates it at 30% – so the Cultural Olympiad’s short-term power within the Arts now begins to assert itself. The comprehensive spending review stated that the annual budget of the ACE will effectively be cut from £449.5m in the current financial year to £349m by 2014. And whilst the Olympics budget has not escaped the scrutiny of the Tories, the sheer scale of the event and the fact that most of the prestige arts projects have already been signed off, the Cultural Olympiad is turning into the big show.

As the ever excellent Arts Desk points out, the Cultural Olympiad due to organisational issues is now focusing solely on 2012. (I must add that despite being a huge fan of sport and a culture vulture, I am relieved by this. The proposal for a Freedom Ship, which would have sailed the world full of arty folk between the Beijing and London Games, sounds like hell on earth. I imagine a tall ship going alongside in Mombassa and the Singing Kettle pouring out of it.)  With McKenzie not yet in post,  the Arts Council announced 12 commissions around the country, on which they are spending £5.4 million in October last year. These look decidedly woolly. Meanwhile Ruth Mackenzie has managed to scrape together a budget of £80 million solely for 2012, although much of this is support in kind, including a huge contribution from the now cash-strapped BBC.

But in a shrinking funding pool, the Olympiad, despite its clout, has yet to find a convincing sense of itself.  Yes, it has a hugely impressive group of advisers: Alex Poots, director of the Manchester International Festival, Brian McMaster, the longest serving director of the Edinburgh Festival, and Martin Duncan, Mackenzie’s former co-director at the Chichester Festival Theatre, all of whom have a pedigree of putting on excellent, unpatronising, unashamedly high-brow work. Yet what we have seen of the cultural component of the Olympics is still generally about pushing the inclusivity agenda of the event: Stories of the World for children and Unlimited “a £1.5million commission fund to support high-quality collaborations between disability arts organisations, disabled artists and producers, and mainstream arts organisations.”

The arts have always been integral to the Olympics but have always had an uneasy relationship with it. Indeed, until the last Olympics held in London in 1948, medals were given for the best arts projects, and more. Anyone who visited the Victoria and Albert Museum between 15 July and 14th August in that year would have seen medal winning work by a number of individuals included one called  Yrjö Lorentz Lindegren from Finland  who won a gold medal for  town planning for an Athletic Centre in Varkau in 1948. Indeed this championing of sport is ubiquitous throughout the Olympic cultural strand going back to the founding of the modern games in 1896. Art is not allowed to exist on its own terms and must champion some aspect of sport, endowing the latter with a dubious moral or social purpose and corrupting the former to mere propaganda.  A perfect example is this: In 1912, under the pseudonyms Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach, Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic movement and the President of the International Olympic Committee entered his “Ode au Sport” in two languages for the 1912 Olympic Art Competition. Lo and behold it won a gold medal.

Despite the strengths of McKenzie and her advisory committee, I strongly doubt whether the Cultural Olympiad will be able to prevent itself from becoming a beauty pageant to promote the Games. Those who believe that the arts in England could do with some blood-letting should be aware that with the Cultural Olympiad’s increasing influence on our cultural landscape, art is going to have an increasingly and more obvious role as propaganda. Around 1/5th of the entire arts budget in 2012 will go on saying something positive about a sporting event.

Charlotte Higgins hinted in the Guardian that McKenzie is interested in celebrating the idea of truce and the role of the United Nations in them during the Olympiad. I’ll believe that when I see it. The International Olympic Committee which maintains control over the tone of the Games through signed protocols is unlikely to countenance this and will seek a celebration instead of its own role as a guarantor of harmony. Even if McKenzie is successful, the Cultural Olympiad will demand that artists celebrate the values of an organisation. This will tend towards a corruption of the arts as a whole rather than prompt some libertarian unfettering of it.

Still as Giovanna Mazotti made clear in the rest of her interview, beauty pageants are subject to all kinds of political influences, not just the Olympics. On her ignominious return she told her interviewer that Miss Hawaii was voted runner-up “because they have been promising statehood to those islands and that Miss Hong Kong was placed third “…so that the Orientals won’t think America has prejudices, and in spite of the war in Korea, beauty is still beauty.”

Miss Olympic, sorry, Miss Universe 1952.

During 1858, the summer was unusually hot. The Thames and many of its urban tributaries were overflowing with sewage; the warm weather encouraged bacteria to thrive and the resulting smell was so overwhelming that it affected the work of the House of Commons. The curtains of the house were soaked in chloride of lime. Members considered relocating upstream to Hampton Court. Plans were made to evacuate to Oxford and St Albans. In typical London fashion, heavy rain finally ended the heat and humidity of summer. However, a House of Commons select committee was appointed to report on the Stink and recommend how to end the problem.

Bazalgette designed an extensive underground sewerage system that diverted waste to the Thames Estuary, downstream of the main centre of population. Six main interceptory sewers, totalling almost 100 miles (160 km) in length, were constructed, some incorporating stretches of London’s submerged rivers. Three of these sewers were north of the river, the southernmost, low-level one being incorporated in the Thames Embankment. The intercepting sewers, constructed between 1859 and 1865, were fed by 450 miles (720 km) of main sewers that, in turn, conveyed the contents of some 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of smaller local sewers. Construction of the interceptor system required 318 million bricks, 2.7 million cubic metres of excavated earth and 670,000 cubic metres of concrete.

Gravity allows the sewage to flow eastwards, but in places such as Chelsea, Deptford and Abbey Mills, pumping stations were built to raise the water and provide sufficient flow. The Abbey Mills Pump Stations is probably one of the greatest pieces of architecture ever created to house water treatment. It was designed by Bazalgette, together with the architect Charles Driver and completed in 1868. By building a Byzantine, brick shrine, rather than a modest envelope, the engineer glorified waste management.

Today this sewage system, with the Pump Station as its crowning glory is being honoured in a clever, yet subtle way by a new sewage facility, designed by architect John Lyall. Although Lyall has worked on infrastructure projects before – particularly memorable is his Floating Fire Station on the Thames and his underground station at North Greenwich – the Pudding Mill Pumping station is a radical departure. Although a project like the Fire Station owes a debt to early Rogers with its exposed steel members and a corrugated cladding, Pudding Mill is dense and concrete. It’s less Hi-Tech and more Steam Punk, taking its cue from not just from brutalism but also from a decorative, Victorian tradition.

Lyall has scored reliefs of Bazalgette’s beautiful plans for Abbey Mills into the concrete paneling of his own pumping station. We too should glorify the civilised way we deal with out waste, it subtly says.  It promises to provide a solid yet, texturally rich gatepost to the Olympics.