Olympic Flame Relay operations under a ‘world's best practices’ regime: a conversation with Steven McCarthy

Abstract

Steven McCarthy is founder, Chairman and CEO of Além International Management Inc., today's leading transnational provider of operational services for the Olympic Flame Relay (OFR). As operations manager for the 1996 Atlanta relay, managing director of the 2002 Salt Lake City relay, and operations manager of the international segment of the 2004 Athens relay, as well as the author of the IOC's official OFR technical manual, McCarthy has played the leading role in innovating key aspects and codifying the whole of today's ‘world's best practices’ model of OFR production. In this article, he discusses the origins of transnational OFR operations companies, the core ritual responsibilities of relay supervisors, security and safety issues, negotiation strategies with local authorities, and collaboration and conflicts among commercial sponsors, organizing committees, and operations personnel. A persistent theme in the conversation is just how universal or ethnocentric any world's best practices model turns out to be, and what the future role of the central IOC administration should be in protecting and replenishing the symbolic and moral capital of the OFR and through it the Olympic Movement. This conversation between the OFR's leading ethnographer and its leading transnational manager provides an unprecedented backstage view of one of the world's most important rituals, discussing dramatic issues and episodes equally unknown to Olympic publics and authorities.

Notes

¹ The interview took place in Boulder, Colorado, USA, August 15–17, 2006, supplemented by phone conversation through August, 2007. Jessica Robinson did the transcription, for which both parties to the conversation express their deepest gratitude. This article is edited and condensed from a much longer transcript and contains spliced quotations. Additional conversations with Além personnel Cheryl Cagle, Gillian Hamburger, and Simon Wadley were very clarifying.

² Now Hilary Hanson McKean and a senior executive with the public relations firm Ketchum, Inc. See MacAloon, ‘This Flame, Our Eyes: Greek/American/IOC Relations, 1984–2004’, this volume.

³ Rennie Truitt, who had advanced political campaigns before working for ACOG, subsequently became Senior Vice-president and General Manager of the Edelman Public Relations firm's Atlanta offices. The significance of the ACOG organizational placement of the OFR and comparisons with other Olympic Games Organizing Committees (OCOGs) are discussed in MacAloon, ‘“My Programme Became Very Strict”’, this volume.

⁴ Each state government of the United States has its own police force. With a quite dubious argument but strong political backing, the Georgia State Patrol successfully insisted that it should accompany the 1996 relay all across America. Their presence added a whole new level of jurisdictional disputes as the relay entered the territories of other local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.

⁵ Di Henry was the director for the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic flame relays. Appointed early by the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee (SOCOG), she was able to travel extensively on the Atlanta relay as an ACOG guest. Sydney adopted nearly wholesale the Atlanta flame relay practices. Di Henry eventually founded her own company Maxxam International Ltd, on the explicit model of Steve McCarthy's Além International, and the two firms are now friendly competitors for Olympic, Paralympic, and Regional Games flame relay business around the world. References in these essays to the ‘world's best practices model’ cover both Além and Maxxam since, while flame relay insiders recognize clear differences in culture and performance between the two firms, their operational models and practices are overwhelmingly congruent.

⁶ Individual torches can and do go out all the time. The point is that they are always relit from one of several ‘mother flames’ carefully guarded in multiple miners' lanterns from Olympia through the relay to the Opening Ceremonies.

⁷ Unlike 1984, no funds from the relay went directly to this or any other charity. Instead the 1996 OFR helped to refurbish the image of United Way that had lately been beset by management scandals. While beset with nothing remotely as controversial as the LAOOC's open sales of torchbearer rights to raise money for charities, ACOG's community hero programme was not entirely trouble-free. In many communities, the final torchbearer roster was not as economically and racially diverse as desired because of entirely inadvertent biases in the nomination and selection process.The comparative point with Seoul, Barcelona, Albertville, Lillehammer, Athens, and Beijing is that in the US, even local government would never, ever be accepted as being directly involved in torchbearer selection processes. In American culture, sport normatively belongs to civil society, not the state. Hence the involvement of charities and not government bodies in the 1984, 1996, and 2002 OFRs is perfectly congruent with other distinctive American Olympic practices, like the absence of a cabinet or sub-cabinet level sports ministry, the prohibition on direct tax money transfers to the United States Olympic Committee or American OCOGs, and so on.

⁸ This too became another sponsorship/official supplier opportunity on the American relays, with Kodak supplying torchbearers with their photographs through a website that, needless to say, offered additional promotional opportunities for the company.

⁹ My oldest son was a volunteer on the 1996 Atlanta relay and, like all such persons, he was rewarded for his hard work with the honour of carrying the Olympic Flame. I was preparing to watch him do so from inside a motor home in the OFR caravan, a platform normally assigned to carry ACOG officials and VIPs but kindly offered to me as my ethnographic base while out on the relay. The Além driver, Nancy Murphy, an accomplished arts marketing executive in her normal life, commented on how excited I must be as ‘someone who knew all about what it feels like to carry the flame’. I laughed and said that while I had interviewed hundreds of torchbearers over the years, I had never carried the flame myself, so my son would have to tell me about it. She was astonished, but I explained that adults do not normally carry the flame in Greece, that officials on other relays just assumed, as she had, that I had carried the flame several times, and that it was quite beyond me to ever think of asking for this privilege. Nancy grabbed her walkie-talkie and called up to Steve McCarthy and Hilary Hanson in the command car, and, before I could quite process what was happening, a motorcycle pulled alongside and a torchbearer uniform was passed through the van window. A few moments later, I was bearing the Olympic Flame and then passing that flame from my torch to my son's, before he carried on through the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina. The photographs of these moments, together with those of my daughter carrying the flame and my younger son helping light a cauldron during the Salt Lake relay – Steve McCarthy's fraternal way of honouring my years of work on the OFR – are more precious to me than any other artefact of my career in Olympic studies, including the IOC's Olympic Order. These photos were all taken by the professional photographers on the media truck in question here, and I mention these personal details to show just how deeply vexed and ambivalent I am about this policy matter. Still, as painful as it would be, I would sacrifice these mementos to know that the public ritual participants on the side of the road would no longer have their views obstructed and their ritual experience truncated by this media truck.

¹⁰ ‘Activation’ is the professional euphemism for ‘self-promotion’ activities among corporate marketers. Sponsors pay a large rights fee, in negotiated combination of cash and value-in-kind (VIK), for an exclusive in their product category. ‘Presenting partner’, a new category Coca-Cola demanded and eventually won for itself on the OFR, carries an even larger fee. Sponsors then spend additional monies, usually a significant multiple of the initial rights fee, to activate their sponsorship, that is to engage in promotion activities designed to publicize the sponsorship and leverage it for greater sales of the company's product or services. While basic matters like logo placement, proximity, and size are usually carefully set out in the sponsor contract, other activation practices are not, and it is in this domain that most of the conflicts between the OCOG flame relay managers and sponsor-hired activation teams have raged out on recent OFRs.

¹¹ The congruence with Olympic broadcasters, at least in the United States, is very strong and just as challenging for activists. For example, anyone who thinks that Dick Ebersol, Peter Diamond, and the other principals at NBC Olympic Broadcasting are not themselves passionate partisans of the Olympic Movement and are deeply moved by the ‘up, close and personal’ athlete stories that have for years centred their coverage has clearly never met these individuals. As with Coke and Samsung Olympic executives in the sponsorship field, it may be comforting in certain quarters to imagine media bosses as simple patronizers and manipulators of public taste for commercial gain, but this fantasy can never be politically progressive. It is no less a form of commodity fetishism, in the classical Marxian sense, than what it claims to criticize. Real political analysis and any potential for effective political action begins, in my experience, with the difficult recognition based on face-to-face, ethnographic interaction that such persons are both commercially interested and true believers.

¹² This Lillehammer relay has been carefully documented and analysed by a team of anthropologists from the University of Oslo, in the only book-length, fieldwork-based, scholarly study of a particular OFR. Sadly, this wonderful work has not yet been translated into English. See Arne Martin Klausen, et al., Fakkel-Stafetten: en Olympisk Ouverture. To further contextualize this relay in the overall Lillehammer project, see Klausen, Lillehammer-OL og olympismen; leaving just, project, see Klausen, The Olympic Games as Performance and Event.

¹³ In a November 2006 conversation in Lausanne, Felli agreed that the number of sponsor torchbearers I reported to him for Athens ‘was completely out of hand’, and he promised to get after the problem. I take the formal and transparent announcement by BOCOG, in the summer of 2007, of precisely the number and percentages of sponsor torchbearers and escort runners for the Beijing OFR to be Mr. Felli keeping his word. Undoubtedly, he was assisted in this case by the very different underlying relationship between corporations and political, and public culture in China. However, in the same conversation, Felli was taken aback when I used the expression ‘Olympic Flame Relay Community’ in the context of discussing its shocks over ritual violations in Torino. Felli demanded to know to whom I might be referring. The professionals he knew, of course, but he seemed unfamiliar with and puzzled by the notion of a transnational ‘laity’ of flame ceremonies aficionados, torch relay pilgrims, former torchbearers, bloggers, memorabilia collectors, independent scholars, artists, school groups, and the like, who intensively follow all OFR developments. This lacuna is entirely consistent with the self-centred and, in my opinion, destructive way that the IOC defines ‘Olympic Movement’ in the Olympic Charter and related documents and attitudes today. If the Olympic Movement indeed were to consist solely of those whom the IOC authorizes, notably members of recognized sport organizations, sponsors, media, and athletes, then there would no longer be any Olympic Movement in the established sociological meaning of the term; an Olympic sports industry and Olympic sports system, yes, an Olympic Movement, no.

¹⁴ Some months after this conversation with Steve McCarthy, a high IOC official said to me that while it was desirable that the flame that arrives in the Opening Ceremony and lights the cauldron be the actual flame from Olympia, the only really important thing to him was that ‘the public believes it is the authentic flame’. Cynical pragmatism, perhaps. But what this statement certainly does represent is a further triumph of the logic of spectacle over that of ritual among the self-described guardians of the Olympic Movement. Ritual honesty, responsibility and sincerity – and therefore ritual efficacy – are less important than the spectacular appearance of these things. The simulacrum will suffice for Olympic leaders, and if the public partisans of the Olympic Movement are being truly fooled, well, how can it hurt them?The IOC has frequently been compared with the Vatican, but episodes and attitudes such as these remind us that there is no Congregation of Sacred Rites in Lausanne. Nearly all other Olympic functions and properties have IOC commissions charged with their well-being, but not Olympic ceremonies. At a 1990 Olympic symposium arranged by the late Fernand Landry in Quebec City, IOC President Samaranch privately asked a group of scholars what governance initiatives they would like to see. When I answered that we wanted an IOC commission on ceremonies, he waved the suggestion away as ‘insufficiently important’. So left to marketing and games operations, and subject to unchecked and ad hoc presidential intervention, it is little wonder that the OFR, the Opening and Closing, and the Victory Ceremonies today depend chiefly on other parties than the IOC administration for their ritual integrity. These other parties have frequently included OCOG officials and operatives, and this is one reason why the current IOC efforts to treat OCOGs as mere franchisees should not be accepted in any blanket fashion, in my opinion. In the area of ritual, OCOGs have been the main sources of both conservation and creativity in recent decades.

¹⁵ See ‘A Conversation with Athanassios Kritsinelis’, this volume.

¹⁶ In the aftermath of Beijing, the IOC banned global relays for subsequent Summer Olympics as well.

¹⁷ Two months before these conversations with Steven McCarthy, I met with the BOCOG OFR director Zhang Ming and her staff in Beijing, and she was eager to discuss the enormous pressure they were feeling from the IOC to accept Coca-Cola as a relay sponsor, when they preferred to have ‘only national companies’. I did not learn until an interview with Michael Payne in Lausanne in November 2006, that the IOC had already given Coke the right of first refusal of any OFR sponsorship for the duration of its new contract. This provision has never, to my knowledge, been publicly acknowledged. I do not know if Zhang Ming was aware of it when we spoke, but in any case it rendered moot our Beijing discussions and subsequent interventions.The decision later worked out between the IOC, BOCOG, and these major TOP sponsor companies, made Samsung the 2008 international relay presenting partner, while reserving for Coke the domestic relay in China. A top IOC official presented this resolution to me as a wise compromise, giving each company what it most wanted, while cutting down on the risk of Torino-style anti-globalization demonstrations. Of course, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, the Beijing international relay was to face far greater and more important protests.

¹⁸ Cheju Island is the home of both a powerful Korean origin myth and the famous tolharubang lava rock statues. The myth combines a chthonic emergence motif – the hunter brothers Yang, Koh, and Buk emerge from three holes in the ground – and an invading royalty motif – they marry three princesses who have come westward across the sea bringing with them agriculture and animal husbandry. As for the tolharubang or ‘grandfather’ statues, one branch of both scholarly and folk opinion links military aspects of their costuming as far back down the Silk Road as the empire of Alexander the Great, while their general sculptural form summons Polynesian parallels. In 1988, the Olympic Flame was taken for ceremonies at both the Samong Hyol, the Yang-Koh-Buk shrine, and to various tolharubang sites. Professor Kang Shin-pyo, who studied as well as contributed to the Seoul 1988 ritual designs, has shown how highly self-conscious the Seoul OFR planners were about performing this East meets West motif in a logic of hierarchical complementarity. See MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’.In this same article, Kang and I document and analyse several OFR practices that brought the ritual into conformity with Korean and East-Asian cultural codes but would find no place in today's ‘world's best practices’ model. For example, an individual torchbearer surrounded only by relay personnel, including security escort runners, would look completely wrong to Koreans. So in 1988, each flame bearer led a carefully composed and highly formalized group from six to ten accompanying runners. When shown films of this relay, Western audiences, in my experience, inevitably notice this practice and regularly wonder if it did not somehow take away from the actual torchbearer's experience.

¹⁹ Another variant on unitary flame controversies concerns the use of national cultural flames and relays and their proper relations with the OFR. In Korea in 1988, SLOOC lit a Korea flame on Kanghwa Island at the traditional site of the descent to earth of Korea's mythical founder Tangun. This flame was then relayed to the Peace Gate in Seoul's Olympic Park. However, following a cultural logic Kang and I have called ‘side-by-side, no mixing’, the Korean organizers were extremely careful that this Korean national flame relay never intersected with or even approached the OFR, that the Korea Flame was extinguished by the time the OFR arrived in the capital, and that the Korea Flame received little or no international publicity. Greek flame relay officials whom I travelled with in Korea did express private disagreement when they learned of this Korea flame. Because of this experience, I warned a high Lillehammer Culture and Ceremonies Department official that a similar plan for a Norwegian Flame could run into trouble and create real controversy. Unfortunately, this warning was ignored, and LOOC went ahead with its plan to not only light a flame in the family hearth of the ‘father of skiing’ Sondre Nordheim at Morgedal in Telemark, but also to merge this flame with the Olympia Flame on the eve of the Games. As I predicted, this led to an enormous row with the Hellenic Olympic Committee and a sector of Greek public opinion. LOOC CEO Gerhard Heiberg and his team eventually backed down, and the Morgedal flame arrived in Oslo on a different day than and was not merged with the Olympia Flame. Instead the Morgedal flame was used for the Paralympic Games. See Klausen, ‘The Torch Relay’; MacAloon, ‘Anthropology at the Olympics’; Puïjk, ‘From Parish Pump to Global Village’; MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’.

²⁰ For a general treatment of this opposition between universal humanism and interculturalism in Olympic affairs, see MacAloon, ‘Humanism as Political Necessity?’.