Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form

Abstract

This article introduces and contextualizes an anthropological study of the Olympic Flame Relay across 25 years, from Los Angeles 1984 through the aftermath of Beijing, punctuated by the announcement by the International Olympic Committee Executive Board in March 2009, that there would be no more global relays. This extended ethnological research offers a rare case study of continuity and change in a leading transnational and transcultural ritual form. It also further exposes the managerial revolution, with its characteristic language of ‘world's best practice,’ that has succeeded the commercial revolution in international Olympic affairs. Analysis of the transnational flow of Olympic operations management offers important corrections to much existing globalization theory, demonstrating both how powerful and how culturally and politically parochial world's best practices can turn out to be. Finally, this extended case study offers a further development of the author's theoretical work on complex cultural performance systems, in particular the dialectic between the performative genres of ritual and spectacle that indexes the wider Olympic Movement's struggle to preserve itself from the successes of the Olympic sports industry.

Notes

¹ Previous work by anthropologists on the Olympic Flame Relay has been limited to singular performances. See MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’ on the Seoul OFR and Klausen et al., Fakkel-Stafetten, the latter a wonderful monograph on Lillehammer that sadly remains untranslated from the original Norwegian.

² Wilson, ‘IOC member rips “disaster” of global torch relay’.

³ Other contributors to this volume, IOC official and especially managerial speech, and popular discourse as well now generally refer in English to the ‘Olympic Torch Relay’. I myself persist in the older usage ‘Olympic Flame Relay’ as being not only closer to the ancient Greek prototype (lampadedromia) and to modern Greek ritual practice, but also as an anthropological statement and intervention. First of all, the empirical fact is that the flame, not the torch is what is relayed. (Calgary 1988 was the only recent exception.) Second, the flame is the sacred thing for ritual adepts and partisans, not the torch, though once used in the relay, the latter certainly is transformed through ‘the contagiousness of the sacred’ (Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life). Third, the linguistic shift to ‘torch relay’ from ‘flame relay’ historically coincides with and marks the incipient commodification of the ritual critically analysed in this volume. Torches today are offered for sale to torchbearers and are resold on eBay and among memorabilia collectors. There is a market in torches; there is no market in flames. An essential ritual practice is that the Olympic flame is completely extinguished at every Olympic Closing Ceremony and does not reappear save at Ancient Olympia to inaugurate the rites of separation for the next Games (Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage; Turner, The Ritual Process). Since the flame cannot be unitized under these conditions, it cannot be priced for a market, the core definition of commodification. Corporate sponsors compete to be ‘presenting partners’ and suppliers for the relay as a whole. But, they are not sold rights to the flame itself. Indeed, as we shall see, sponsors are today in a perpetual struggle with relay officials as to how near their corporate marks will be allowed to approach the flame. In French, the other official language of the Olympic Movement, the linguistic drift to relai de flambeau is less egregious. While flambeau means torch, it remains cognate with flamme, or ‘flame’. In Korea, the performance is called song-hwa pong-song, roughly glossed as ‘sacred fire reverently dedicated and delivered’. No mention is made of torches.

⁴ See, for example Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings; Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott, The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System; MacAloon, ‘Scandal and Governance’.

⁵ Richard Pound, personal communication, September, 2008.

⁶ The present author played a modest role in these Beijing flame relay plans. While it was probably always the case that Beijing organizers, with their ‘everything is bigger in China’ ethos, would have planned a global relay to outdo Athens 2004, I had several conversations on the subject in 1998–1999 with He Zhenliang, IOC member in China and the godfather of the Beijing bid (Liang, He Zhenliang and China's Olympic Dream). I reminded him that the Silk Road was the appropriate historical path/metonymy for the Chinese relay, and that China could complete what Tokyo had gestured at with its 1964 relay. (The original idea for a Silk Road relay from Greece to East Asia apparently belonged to Carl Diem, the chief inventor of the modern OFR, suggested by him for the never-to-be-held 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Borgers, Olympic Torch Relays, 30; Dietrich Quanz and Karl Lennartz, personal communications, 1991.)Mr. He took the idea back to BOBICO, the Beijing bid committee, and by the time I arrived for consultations in February 2000, it was firmly installed in the Chinese bid. Meeting with a group of mid-level international relations and marketing managers, I was asked ‘Which Silk Road route should we take? There are many Silk Roads’. I replied that you take the route with the most IOC votes. It took them a moment to understand my meaning: you tell voting IOC members in the Middle East and Central, South and Southeast Asia that if Beijing wins the rights to the 2008 Games, they and their countries will host the OFR. This is a matter of considerable importance for nations with no hope of ever hosting the Olympic Games themselves, as well as a valued opportunity for dramatic, public cameos by the IOC members and other local Olympic officials. The next day, my existing schedule was cancelled and I found myself ushered into a room with the bid's top leadership, including Beijing Mayor Luo, Secretary General Wang Wei, and Foreign Ministry officials. I was asked to repeat my advice, and a roster of voting IOC members in ‘Silk Road’ countries was drawn up. I was later told that a Beijing delegation was sent out to those countries only a few days after this meeting. While there is no way to know how many votes in Beijing's eventual landslide might have been influenced by OFR considerations, the route presented during BOBICO's final presentation to the IOC in Moscow did indeed ‘chase the votes’. (That presentation also included the surprise plan to take the flame to the top of Mount Everest, a resolution that made my jaw drop and instantly implicated both the logic of the spectacle and political issues of Chinese hegemony in Tibet.)

⁷ A number of IOC members, of course, had a vested interest in the Olympic flame visiting their home countries, because it offered public ‘star turns’ for themselves. I shall not take up these IOC governance issues in any detail here. Suffice it to say that there is ample precedent for these constitutional problems. Certain of the recommendations of the IOC 2000 Reform Commission, passed by the 1999 IOC special Session, were subsequently ignored by the IOC Executive. See MacAloon, ‘Scandal and Governance’. For a historical and public administration overview of Olympic governance, see Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott, The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System.In Torino, cadres of protesters even physically impeded the relay and endeavoured to snatch the flame away from torchbearers (see Figure 2). These unprecedented actions against the OFR were carried out by a small group of anarchists angered at local development projects having nothing directly to do with the Games. In the most publicized incident in the northern town of Trento, four of those who briefly seized the torch from athletics Olympian Eleonara Berlanda were arrested. (Two received jail sentences of three and four months and fines of €5000.) But the press also reported a total of 36 less dramatic protests along the route, demonstrations whose rhetoric encompassed anti-globalization sentiment especially targeting the relay sponsor Coca-Cola. One relay segment through the Susa Valley was eventually cancelled, Coke and Samsung having already decided that their vehicles would not dare to accompany the flame through the Susa. (Infoshopnews, ‘Four Anarchists Arrested’; Associated Press, ‘Torch Relay Hits Protest’.) For Rogge's mention of Torino in the Beijing debate, see Wilson, ‘IOC member rips “disaster” of Global Torch Relay’.

⁸ Richard Pound contested for the IOC presidency in 2000 and with three other candidates lost out to Jacques Rogge. For Pound's own account of his defeat, see Inside the Olympics, 265–70. Absent from this text is acknowledgement of his intemperate post-election letter to sponsors suggesting that their interests would be compromised by Rogge, a letter quickly leaked to journalists. In response, Rogge publicly revealed that Pound's law firm had for years been secretly compensated for his services as IOC television rights negotiator, a scandal in an organization whose members serve as volunteers. Pound went on to make a critical contribution to world sport as president and chief animator of the World Anti-Doping Association and remains the most outspoken and reflective critic and leader of the loyal opposition to the Rogge regime within the IOC. See his major policy analysis, ‘The Future of the Olympic Movement’.

⁹ See, for example, the discussion in Sassen's classic The Global City, 347–49. Also, see Robertson, Globalization; Robertson and Guilianotti, Globalization and Sport.

¹⁰ The late Byron Amelides, her father, was a long-time HOC employee who was instrumental in my being able to do the fieldwork on the Barcelona OFR reported herein. Together with Nikos Nissiotis, this book is dedicated to his memory.

¹¹ International Olympic Committee, ‘Technical Manual on Olympic Torch Relay, June 2007’. The IOC describes its Technical Manuals as documents that contain ‘key educational information on a specific subject (Games function or theme) … functional requirements, constituent perspective, planning information, current practices. Technical Manuals are also annexes to the Host City Contract, and therefore contain contractual requirements’ (6). Technical Manuals are not public documents, and I am grateful to Gilbert Felli who, in deference to my decades of anthropological and diplomatic work on the OFR, provided me a copy and permission to cite its contents in a general way.

¹² Popular and much academic discourse suggests that global corporations sponsor the Olympics to sell more soft drinks, bottled water, DVD players and televisions. As a general truism, it is impossible to argue, but the assertion is uninformed and simplistic when it comes to proximate sponsor agendas with particular Olympic programmes. The experience of carrying the Olympic flame is for most torchbearers unforgettable and for many a lifetime highlight. Coke, Samsung and national suppliers have learned how much favour and loyalty they can command from targeted business prospects, governmental officials, financial allies, celebrities and high-achieving employees throughout the world in return for supplying them (or their designated relatives) with the opportunity to carry the Olympic Flame, particularly in their own countries, places of work and even home neighbourhoods. A global relay contractually offers Coke and Samsung the torchbearer slots to court and reward elites in many countries where these companies do or wish to do business.As the ensuing papers will show, there are other sponsor benefits, such as influencing the relay route to stop for celebrations at company offices and dealerships. But it is the torchbearer programme that matters most to them. OFR sponsors try to keep these activities and particularly the number of the torchbearer slots they control out of public view, often masking them with much smaller programmes of public-nominated ‘community hero’ torchbearers. Even IOC and National Olympic Committee (NOC) officials have been surprised at how far things had gone on recent relays. Marc Maes coordinated the 2004 Athens relay stops in Belgium and wrote a commissioned IOC report on behalf of the European NOCs who hosted relay visits. The unpublished report complained vigorously of how many torchbearer slots were reserved for the sponsors and how few were given to the NOCs, ‘even for our great Olympians’ in 2004 (personal communication, February, 2007). IOC Olympic Games executive director Gilbert Felli was taken aback when I informed him in 2006 of our research findings that 60% or more of the torchbearers on sections of the Athens relay were sponsor selected. Perhaps as a consequence, BOCOG published well in advance the percentages of citizen, Olympic Family, and sponsor torchbearers for its relay, with the last category substantially reduced, in percentage terms, over previous relays.

¹³ Interviews in Lausanne in 2006 revealed some IOC anxiety about sponsor presence on the global Beijing relay that seemed to centre on Coca-Cola's special symbolic appeal as a target for anti-globalization protesters, a lingering effect of Torino. Indeed, some in the IOC administration were imagining a ‘solution’ whereby Coke would be the lead sponsor presence during the relay within China – the Chinese market being imagined as Coke's biggest object of desire – while the less volatile Samsung would be presenting partner for the global relay segment. It was ironic, then, for me to discover in a subsequent meeting in Beijing with BOCOG OFR director Zhang Ming and her team that the Chinese were actively trying to find a way ‘against IOC pressure’ to avoid a Coca-Cola relay presence within China! BOCOG at that time wanted permission for five national sponsors to replace what Coke would contribute, but ‘the IOC says that's too many’ (doubtless reflecting certain verities of the IOC-endorsed ‘world's best practice’ model). Neither BOCOG nor its OFR-operating consultants Maxxam – the Australian company Di Henry opened as a copy-cat for Sydney 2000 of Steven McCarthy's American-based Além International – expressed any concern to us about Coke and Samsung ‘presenting’ the global portion of the Beijing relay. I am unable to report on the ensuing negotiations among the IOC, BOCOG and the sponsors. In the end, Coke and Samsung won pretty much the same initial arrangements on the international Beijing OFR as they had for Athens.

¹⁴ This intelligence about the latest Coca-Cola/IOC contract was provided to me by Michael Payne, former IOC marketing director, in an interview in his Lausanne offices in November 2006. Vancouver suggests that Samsung has been unsuccessful in its attempts to acquire a similar right of first refusal for flame relay ‘presenting partnership’ in its latest contract with the IOC. (To say the least, these contracts are not public documents.)

¹⁵ These security arrangements are detailed in my interview with Steven McCarthy who was the chief originator of them in the OFR context. The security envelope around the torchbearer expands or contracts, accordion-style, depending upon crowd and road conditions, but generally is bounded by the media truck in front, motorcyclists on the sides and the command car in the rear, with the torchbearer and one or more accompanying security runners in the middle. In city contexts, it is a space of around 100–200 square metres. Incidentally, this same envelope is mandated in the standard model to be free of all sponsor marks or signage. Only Olympic marks should appear within it, by analogy with the commercial signage-free Olympic venues at the Games. Durkheim classically defined ‘the sacred’ as persons, spaces and things, ‘set apart and forbidden’ (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life). It is intriguing that in contemporary OFR practice, the sacred space is defined by the presence of the Olympic flame, the torchbearer, and a few ritual personnel, and the forbidding of both ordinary persons (‘spectators’) and identifiable sponsor marks. As will be made plain in these pages, the ‘game’ for sponsors becomes slipping from the spectacle and festival spaces into the ritual space through means ranging from sponsor-selected torchbearers to vehicle windscreens unavoidable in media pictures.

¹⁶ The accomplished American Olympic journalist Alan Abrahamson was a scheduled torchbearer in San Francisco and provided on his blog (‘Behind the Scenes With the Torch’) a participant's account of this chaotic strategy of accommodating public safety, dissent and relay responsibility in an American context.

¹⁷ Fenner, ‘The 2008 Flame Relay in Oman’.

¹⁸ Political demonstrations of any sort are proscribed within Olympic Games venues as a matter of contract with Olympic host cities and governments. The Chinese authorities failed to see how the OFR route did not comprise an Olympic ‘venue’ and therefore why the same strictures were not being applied. The authorities in several OFR cities responded that the envelope around the flame was indeed to be kept politically neutral, while non-violent citizens just outside it we free to express themselves. The Chinese countered that the shouts and chants of these demonstrators did indeed penetrate the sacred space, just as their signage appeared in the background of media coverage of the flame. Therefore, Olympic rules were being violated to harm China.When the PRC authorities saw that their protests would be in vain as the OFR global relay continued, they turned to encouraging pro-China demonstrators to come forward and to counter with their own chanting and placards. This led authorities in some cities to fear violent conflict between the two groups of demonstrators.

¹⁹ The reader can review this photo archive by going to www.gettyimages.com and searching ‘Olympic Torch Relay’. It will be noted how rarely crowds that appear to have spontaneously gathered are pictured, as opposed to carefully organized and choreographed ones. By contrast, the captions to many of the photos posted to the BOCOG website for world distribution repetitively and formulaically insisted that ‘tens of thousands of people were gathered on the streets and roads to watch the torch relay’.

²⁰ See Lane, The Rites of Rulers. This capsule account is based on off-the-record conversations with insiders on the China OFR, none of whom have been willing in public to deviate from the official story of a normal, happy relay throughout China. The reality of the 2008 relay in China is still today being treated as a state secret. By comparing the rosters of torchbearers and officiants in the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games flame relays in Korea, Kang Shin-pyo and I were able to show how sensitive an indicator of domestic political change the OFR can be. (MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’.) Should similar data ever become available for Beijing, it would surely repay a similar study.

²¹ For the classic arguments underlying this analysis, see: Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; van Gennep, The Rites of Passage; Turner, The Ritual Process.

²² Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 30–3.

²³ Furlong, Patriot Hearts, 154.

²⁴ See MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’.

²⁵ MacAloon, This Great Symbol; Herzfeld, Ours Once More.

²⁶ , ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, and ‘The Theory of Spectacle: Reviewing Olympic Ethnography’.

²⁷ See Note 2. Increased vigilance is now required on the part of OFR officials and security teams to prevent organized as well as spontaneous attempts to steal Olympic torches.

²⁸ MacAloon, ‘Scandal and Governance: Inside and Outside the IOC 2000 Commission’.

²⁹ Cheryl Cagle, personal communication, Copenhagen, October, 2009.

³⁰ Robertson, Globalization; Robertson and Guilianotti, Globalization and Sport. For my own theory of ‘empty forms and indigenous meanings,’ related to Robertson's notion of ‘glocalization’, see MacAloon, ‘The Theory of Spectacle’.

³¹ Furlong, Patriot Hearts, 152–4, 163–75. Mr. Furlong's memoir is not unexpectedly glowing and self-congratulatory, as is typical of the genre. But its sections on the OFR give accurate and compelling indication of the role the ritual has come to play over the past quarter-century in the imaginations and motivations of top OCOG leaders. A.D. Frazier, the Atlanta CFO who played the main role in raising nearly $1 billion in corporate monies for those Games, has repeatedly told me that the only moments in which he was sure the effort was worth it were when he was out on the Olympic Flame Relay. By comparison with recent Summer Olympics, there were 13,200 flame bearers for Atlanta, a figure about 30% higher than the number of athletes in those Games. It is significant that for all the other differences between Winter and Summer Games today, their OFRs have grown equal in scale and importance.

³² , ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle’; ‘The Theory of Spectacle’; ‘Genre and Risk in Olympic Ceremonies.’ In the continuing development of my theory of complex, ramified, multi-genre performance systems, this extended case study of the OFR is meant to directly respond to the legitimate demand of proponents of the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of culture for precise specification of the social actors, contexts, and conflicts responsible for the development, reproduction, and transformation of those symbolic forms of greatest interest to cultural anthropologists. Against practitioners of ‘weak programme’, that is to say reductionist sociology, these papers are intended to demonstrate the necessity and the pay-off of getting ethnographically backstage in order to avoid the superficially ‘critical’ reasoning from decontextualized texts that is in my opinion chiefly responsible for giving ‘cultural studies’ of sport such a poor scholarly reputation.