This flame, our eyes: Greek/American/IOC relations, 1984–2002, an ethnographic memoir

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographically based analysis of Olympic flame relay (OFR) relations among the Hellenic Olympic authorities and the Greek public sphere, three American Olympic organizing committees (Los Angeles 1984, Atlanta 1996, and Salt Lake City 2002), and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) across a 20-year period. It provides the first scholarly analysis of the controversies created by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee that nearly led to violence at Ancient Olympia during the flame-lighting ceremonies for those games. It explains how the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games managed to overcome this poisonous history through intensive intercultural diplomacy and to secure an Olympic flame for Atlanta. The structures and events analysed herein transformed the OFR in a variety of ways – from the IOC's attempts to increase its ownership stake in the ritual, to increased corporate sponsor interest in it, to the OFR's emergence as a potential weapon of international political protest – setting the stage for OFR struggles to come in the early years of this century.

Notes

¹ MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’.

² The story has frequently been told, having acquired nearly legendary status in both Atlanta and international Olympic circles. See, for example Katz, ‘Atlanta Brave’; Ruthheiser, Imagineering Atlanta; Yarbrough, And They Call Them Games. Aspects of Payne's story especially relevant to my narrative are: the fully religious nature (in the conventional, Durkheimian, and psychoanalytical senses) of Payne's Olympic inspiration and commitment; his deep and abiding status anxieties with respect to both the Atlanta power elite and all ‘outside’ Olympic experts; and his tendencies towards micromanagement of every aspect of ‘his’ Games. Payne exemplified the Weberian type of the charismatic visionary leader as against the rational-bureaucratic administrator. In Olympic history, one has to go all the way back to Coubertin and his youthful vision in the Rugby School Chapel (MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 51–96) to find a parallel in character and consequence to Payne's vision of an Atlanta Olympic Games as the next step for him after building a baptismal chapel for his Atlanta church. After the Atlanta Olympics, Payne made money as a rainmaker for a Southern bank, then emerged as chairman of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament.

Battle was another Atlanta lawyer. My first contact with him was when he barged into a reception of the Pierre de Coubertin Committee at the Seoul Olympics: ‘Hi. I'm Charlie Battle, Atlanta bid committee. How y'all doing?’ Dressed in standard American business casual, he was so outlandish, glad-handing startled Europeans and South Americans right and left, that I shrank into a corner in embarrassment and spoke only French while he remained in the room. Little could I have imagined then how much this unabashed and unapologetically friendly, Southern American style would contribute to eventually winning the Olympic Games for Atlanta, much less that I would come to befriend and admire this man and to work so closely with him on the Atlanta flame relay and other Olympic projects. In the aftermath of Atlanta 1996, Battle did civic development work for a time, then returned to Olympic affairs as a key consultant for the Beijing, New York, Sochi, Chicago, and Pyeongchang Olympic bids. Today, he is the most internationally accomplished and well known of this new breed of transnational Olympic actors. (See MacAloon, ‘Legacy’.)

³ As, among US Olympic Games and bid chiefs, Peter Ueberroth (Los Angeles 1984) was before him, and Mitt Romney (Salt Lake City 2002), Dan Doctorow (New York 2012), and Patrick Ryan (Chicago 2016) were after him. Nor, during the 25-year period under study in this volume, was the leadership of the US Olympic Committee (USOC) any more politically representative of the US population. The standing joke about the USOC was that it never had more than one Democrat and one speaker of a foreign language … who always turned out to be the same person! For the most part, these American Olympic leaders have been ‘business’ Republicans, sometimes socially moderate, a fact which makes some contextual sense given the tradition of principled distancing of the US government from sports governance and the consequent need to rely heavily on corporate funding and private philanthropy to support the American Olympic movement. (For the deep history of the political structuring of American Olympic affairs, see MacAloon, ‘The 1904 Chicago-St. Louis Transition’.) Only in the past decade has the USOC begun to incorporate more linguistically competent, cosmopolitan, and politically representative persons, but only in its international relations office, not among its Board or officers.

⁴ One consequence of being one of the few governments in the world without a cabinet or sub-cabinet level office of sport, or even a dedicated desk in an established department such as State or Education, is that there has been no continuity of knowledge and expertise about Olympic affairs anywhere in the US government. Every Olympic eventuality thus comes to be treated in an ad hoc manner by competing and uncoordinated branches of the federal government. (See Reich, Making It Happen for a detailed account of the difficulties that necessarily ensue for any American Olympic body seeking to coordinate with the US government). These facts are almost incomprehensible to other nations, which therefore persist in projecting their own utterly different conditions onto US actions. This effect has been clearly implicated in the Greek/American OFR imbroglios. Greeks could scarcely believe that some US government body was not implicated in the offensive ‘American’ initiatives with respect to the 1984 OFR. In 1996, most Greeks would simply assume that Mrs Clinton was the head of the American delegation, with Billy Payne relegated to the status of functionary. Yet, ironically, it was ACOG and not the White House who knew anything going in about the OFR ceremonies.

⁵ In 1988 at a meeting in Seoul, I was one of a substantial multinational group of Olympic scholars and international relations experts who approached Greek IOC member Nikos Filaretos and then Education Minister (subsequently Prime Minister) George Papandreou to offer support and counsel. Despite this group's global contacts and long-time familiarity with Greece and Greek leaders through participation at the International Olympic Academy, it was curtly rebuffed. ‘Greece has everything under control’. Others more influential than us ran into the same attitude again and again.

⁶ The subsequent Greek bid for the 2004 Olympic Games succeeded in part because Mrs Gianna Angelopoulou and her team self-consciously and openly distanced themselves in every way from the rhetoric of the bid for 1996.

⁷ When I had the temerity to confront this discourse by mentioning at a subsequent International Olympic Academy session Greek Coca-Cola's financial support for the Athens bid, Nikos Filaretos – IOA president, IOC member, and bid principal – interrupted from the chair to deny that any such contribution had ever existed. When I persisted, citing Mr Lavrentis and other Greek Coke officials, Filaretos backed down, while asserting that the Coke sponsorship had been very ‘minor’. This episode clearly evidenced the complicity of top Greek Olympic officials in encouraging the Coca-Cola/CNN/Samaranch conspiracy narrative as a cover for their own failures.

⁸ Without the timely assistance of long-time HOC staffer Byron Amelides, I would not have been able to maximize this ethnographic opportunity. I remain perpetually grateful to him. This volume is dedicated to his memory and to that of Nikolaos Nissiotis.

⁹ For further details on this 1992 fieldwork and the Barcelona/Athens relay itself, see ‘My Programme Became Very Strict’, my extended conversation with Nassos Kritsinelis in this volume.

¹⁰ For Payne's views on the torch relay, see his Olympic Turnaround, 125–36. My many conversations with him over the years have confirmed the sincerity of his convictions that, as he writes in his book, ‘at the heart of Olympic symbolism is the Olympic torch’ and that the flame ceremonies have provided ‘some of the most symbolic moments in Olympic history’. This is why it makes absolute sense for corporations to wish to attach themselves to it, in his view. Moreover, since Krupp, Zeiss, and Daimler Benz were official suppliers to the first relay in 1936, and even ancient Greek flame relays had ‘sponsors’ (so Payne anachronistically and tendentiously suggests), it is simply hypocritical for anyone today to object to commercialization of the OFR as ‘a sacrilege against the Olympic ideal’. For further discussion of what Payne did or did not see from his perch in Lausanne about actual sponsor and OFR relations, see ‘Olympic Flame Relay Operations under a “World's Best Practices” Regime’, my extended interview with Steven McCarthy later in this volume.

¹¹ In conducting the work reported in this volume, indeed throughout my entire career, I have made it a matter of principle never to accept any money beyond travel expenses from any Olympic body. Backstage ethnographic access and opportunities to advocate for Olympic movement causes and to mediate intercultural conflicts have been sufficient exchange value for my expertise. For a further discussion, see MacAloon, ‘The Ethnographic Imperative in Comparative Olympic Research’.

¹² Reich, Making It Happen.

¹³ Los Angeles Olympic Games Official Report, 805–17.

¹⁴ Ueberroth, Made in America.

¹⁵ Details on the role and performance of Hilary Hanson – today Hilary Hanson McKean of the Ketchum, Inc. public relations firm – as flame relay director will be found in the subsequent articles, ‘Flame Relay Operations’ and ‘My Programme’.

¹⁶ For a detailed after-action summary of what LA learned about staging such a complex and extensive 82-day relay, see Los Angeles Olympic Games Official Report, 805–17. For the internal struggles within the committee, see Reich, Making It Happen, 177, 180.

¹⁷ Andrew Young is a former mayor of Atlanta, US ambassador to the United Nations, and co-chairman of ACOG. For his views today on the Olympic flame, human rights and political protest, see Tomlinson, ‘Andrew Young’. AD Frazier was ACOG's chief operating officer, an investment banker who raised and supervised more private sector investment in an Olympic Games than any other person in history. As detailed in a later article, Frazier has told the present author many times that ‘being in Greece for the Olympic flame rituals’ was ‘the only time he was certain’ that his whole Olympic engagement was worth it.

¹⁸ Payne, Olympic Turnaround, 126.

¹⁹ Both of these relays demonstrated the OFR's capacity to generate larger historical significances. The Tokyo relay across Asia and Japan was memorably captured in the epic images of Kon Ichikawa's Olympic film, including the famous airborne shots of the Olympic flame passing through the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These images were clearly intended to be juxtaposed with those of the flame entering the Berlin Stadium in Leni Riefentsahl's ‘Olympia’ and thus to bracket ritually the historical period of Second World War. As for Mexico's Columbian journey, with the flame residing on the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan the night before the Olympic opening ceremonies, it is striking how soon thereafter the new form of postcolonial consciousness would make any such celebration of Columbus politically inconceivable.

The 1984 OFR generated larger political meanings as well, as it was appropriated by substantial segments of its audience, with encouragement by Ueberroth and the LAOOC, as a patriotic and nationalist celebration of America in the context of the cold war. For many along the route, the Olympic flame became the American flame. I myself first heard the now common and notorious chanting of ‘U … S … A …, U … S … A …’ out on this relay. The USSR played its role in this by purposely choosing to announce its boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics on the day the American segment of the OFR began. In the aftermath of these Games, Ronald Reagan chose to make the Los Angeles flame relay across America a structuring motif of his presidential re-nomination speech at the Republican national convention. The flame relay, he suggested, had demonstrated the strength of his conservative Republican vision of an America that had put Vietnam behind itself in a newborn patriotism committed to winning the cold war, while iconically proving that collective achievement is the sum of collaborative individual efforts not of rivalrous group identities (the purported social theory of the Democrats). The main text is worth quoting as a master example of differential political appropriation of the social solidarity and communitas everywhere generated by the OFR.

‘We came together in a national crusade to make America great again, and to make a new beginning. Well, now it's all coming together. With our beloved nation at peace, we're in the midst of a springtime of hope for America. Greatness lies ahead of us. Holding the Olympic games here in the United States began defining the promise of this season. All through the spring and summer, we marveled at the journey of the Olympic torch as it made its passage east to west. Over 9,000 miles, by some 4,000 runners, that flame crossed a portrait of our nation. From our Gotham City, New York, to the Cradle of Liberty, Boston, across the Appalachian springtime, to the City of the Big Shoulders, Chicago. Moving south towards Atlanta, over to St. Louis, past its Gateway Arch, across wheatfields into the stark beauty of the Southwest and then up into the still, snowcapped Rockies. And, after circling the greening Northwest, it came down to California, across the Golden Gate and finally into Los Angeles. And all along the way, that torch became a celebration of America. And we all became participants in the celebration. Each new story was typical of this land of ours. There was Ansel Stubbs, a youngster of 99, who passed the torch in Kansas to 4-year-old Katie Johnson. In Pineville, Kentucky, it came at 1 a.m., so hundreds of people lined the streets with candles. At Tupelo, Mississippi, at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, a robed church choir sang “God Bless America” as the torch went by. That torch went through the Cumberland Gap, past the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, down the Santa Fe Trail, and alongside Billy the Kid's grave. In Richardson, Texas, it was carried by a 14-year-old boy in a special wheelchair. In West Virginia the runner came across a line of deaf children and let each one pass the torch for a few feet, and at the end these youngsters’ hands talked excitedly in their sign language. Crowds spontaneously began singing “America the Beautiful” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And then, in San Francisco a Vietnamese immigrant, his little son held on his shoulders, dodged photographers and policemen to cheer a 19-year-old black man pushing an 88-year-old white woman in a wheelchair as she carried the torch.

My friends, that's America.

We cheered in Los Angeles as the flame was carried in and the giant Olympic torch burst into a billowing fire in front of the teams, the youth of 140 nations assembled on the floor of the Coliseum. And in that moment, maybe you were struck as I was with the uniqueness of what was taking place before a hundred thousand people in the stadium, most of them citizens of our country, and over a billion worldwide watching on television. There were athletes representing 140 countries here to compete in the one country in all the world whose people carry the bloodlines of all those 140 countries and more. Only in the United States is there such a rich mixture of races, creeds, and nationalities – only in our melting pot.

And that brings to mind another torch, the one that greeted so many of our parents and grandparents. Just this past Fourth of July, the torch atop the Statue of Liberty was hoisted down for replacement. We can be forgiven for thinking that maybe it was just worn out from lighting the way to freedom for 17 million new Americans. So, now we'll put up a new one. The poet called Miss Liberty's torch the “lamp beside the golden door.” Well, that was the entrance to America, and it still is. And now you really know why we're here tonight'. (Reagen, ‘Convention speech’.)

²⁰ See my ‘Introduction’ to this volume and MacAloon, ‘Theory of Spectacle’.

²¹ All this was of a piece with his general strategy of greatly increased use of commercial corporations to finance an Olympic Games. The claim that the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games were ‘entirely privately funded’ is a piece of right wing business culture ideology. They certainly were funded more largely from corporate and philanthropic dollars than any prior Games. There is also no dispute that Peter Ueberroth's achievements in marketing the Olympics to corporations helped transform the entire Olympic system. See Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings for a contextualized account.

²² Ueberroth, Made in America, 190, emphasis added.

²³ Payne, Olympic Turnaround, 126.

²⁴ Ueberroth, Made in America, 190.

²⁵ Ueberroth, Made in America, 191. I am not convinced that had Ueberroth attempted to clear the idea of an official commercial sponsor for the flame relay with Samaranch, that the latter would have recognized the problems this would necessarily cause with the Hellenic Olympic movement.

²⁶ In turn, AT&T corporate headquarters relied on its ‘Telephone Pioneers of America’ employee association for retiree volunteers and active employees across its several divisions who would staff the relay in their regions of the country. The AT&T ‘cadre runners’ actually carried the flame for over 60% of the route, mostly through unpopulated areas, and ran alongside the ‘community torchbearers’ who carried the flame the rest of the way. The role of these AT&T pioneers in shaping the ‘world's best practice’ model that consolidated in the 1990s is dealt with in the following article.

It must be pointed out that AT&T's advertising and self-marketing ‘activation’ of its sponsorship on its OFR was by any standard modest and tasteful. In comparison with the behaviour of Coca-Cola and Samsung on the subsequent relays to be analysed in later articles of this volume … well, there is no comparison. The AT&T torch relay archives were donated to and are today held by the Special Collections Department of the University of California-Los Angeles Library.

²⁷ Reich, Making It Happen, 43; Payne, Olympic Turnaround, 126; Ueberroth, Made in America, 189–90. The subsequent success of the US domestic relay has led Ueberroth's hagiographers to offer this episode as high testimony to his visionary leadership. But that is because they jingoistically ignore or else trivialize the consequences of this ‘vision’ in Greece, the near bloodshed that ensued at Olympia, and the overall political impact on US/Greek foreign relations. In the years following, corporate OFR sponsors and suppliers have been chiefly concerned with the number of torchbearer slots their sponsorships buy, and these numbers are carefully negotiated and clearly specified in their contacts with the OCOGs. The OCOGs themselves assign torchbearer slots to their ‘friends’, including those who have materially benefited the organization. The controversial practice of offering his or her torch for sale to each torchbearer that came in with Atlanta will be discussed in ensuing articles in this volume. However, much one might want to see these practices as ‘functionally equivalent’, no one has anywhere ever again suggested openly selling the rights to carry the Olympic flame, even for the benefit of sports charities. On this point, history has judged very clearly that Ueberroth should have listened to his management team.

²⁸ Ueberroth, Made in America, 191. The original charities were the Boys Clubs of America, the Girls Clubs of America, and the YMCA, with the Special Olympics added later. Additional youth organizations eventually benefited as well. These charities eventually received a total of $11 million from the flame relay YLK sales, ‘the largest single-event private youth sports fund raiser in the history of the United States’. Los Angeles Olympic Games Official Report, 807, 817.

²⁹ Ueberroth, Made in America, 192. Neither Samaranch nor Berlioux had ever been present in Greece for the flame-lighting, Greek relay or OCOG handover ceremonies, though both had visited the IOA.

³⁰ Ueberroth, Made in America A revealing slippage occurs further on in Ueberroth's memoir in which he appears to refer to the Session's reaction to the LAOOC's Delhi report as a ‘signed deal’. Ibid., 196.

³¹ This assertion is based on numerous and intensive personal conversations with both men in 1984, 1985, and 1986, and with Filaretos in later years.

³² Ueberroth, Made in America, 196, 224.

³³ Official Report, 815; Ueberroth, Made in America, 192, 195; Nikos Filaretos, personal communication, June 1984.

³⁴ In a letter to Samaranch on 12 December 1983 (IOC Archives. Correspondence: JO-1984s-FLAMT), Ueberroth insisted that his raising money for youth was required to elevate the torch relay for ‘the citizens of our entire country … substantially above the singular goal of a wholly ceremonial run’. Ritual to Ueberroth was ‘mere ritual’.

³⁵ Peter Ueberroth was a businessman recruited through a headhunting firm to lead the LAOOC. While he had been a university athlete who once competed for San Francisco's Olympic Club, Ueberroth had no prior experience with international sport or with Olympic institutions and personalities, indeed, had never even attended an Olympic Games. As for Greek and wider European history, he had no formal education in such areas, and he tended to mistake his businessman's experience as head of an international travel company for substantive intercultural knowledge and sensitivity. One of the particularly curious features of the case is that Ueberroth's own wife (née Nikolaus) came from an immigrant Hellenic background. To my knowledge, no one has ever explored this factor in connection with Ueberroth's later relations with Greek Olympism and public opinion. Made in America, 41.

The problem of intercultural knowledge was not only Ueberroth's, but also that of his directors and larger management team, an artefact in no small part of the abnormality of their bid process in the first place. Because Los Angeles was the only real bidder for the 1984 Olympic Games, its bid team never had to get to know very many IOC members or much about IOC governance traditions or about regional differences and sensitivities in the broader Olympic movement.

³⁶ See Fermor, Roumeli; Herzfeld, Ours Once More.

³⁷ In a 9 May 1983, ‘Dear Colleague and Friend’, letter to Filaretos, Samaranch had pleaded for cooperation with the LAOOC because ‘for the first time an organizing committee is entirely a private entity, having no government support as a consequence’ (IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT).

³⁸ Filaretos to Samaranch, 18 and 29 November 1983, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT, my translation from the French.

³⁹ Angelo Lembessis and Nikos Filaretos to Samaranch and Ueberroth, 19 December 1983, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT. In his memoir, Ueberroth did not care to quote the sentence about the contagion of guilt suffered by the US and the USOC (Made in America, 195–6). The degree of Ueberroth's narcissistic resentment at being thus impeded is immediately inscribed in his text, as he childishly and petulantly asserts that the umbrage of ‘the Greeks’ – that phrase again – over commercialization of the flame was not to be taken seriously, since in Olympia there is an ‘Olympic Flame Hotel’ and souvenir plastic torches for sale in tourist shops, while the national airline is Olympic Airways and ‘uses the Olympic rings as its logo’ (not true). Behind the scenes, the discourse could get even worse. LAOOC officials I subsequently interviewed did not shrink from insisting that ‘the Greeks just wanted more money from us’ in return for lighting the flame, and subsequent organizing committees came to hear this canard of HOC blackmail.

⁴⁰ Angelo Lembessis and Nikos Filaretos to Samaranch and Ueberroth, 19 December 1983, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT. In his memoir, Ueberroth did not care to quote the sentence about the contagion of guilt suffered by the US and the USOC (Made in America, 195–6). The degree of Ueberroth's narcissistic resentment at being thus impeded is immediately inscribed in his text, as he childishly and petulantly asserts that the umbrage of ‘the Greeks’ – that phrase again – over commercialization of the flame was not to be taken seriously, since in Olympia there is an ‘Olympic Flame Hotel’ and souvenir plastic torches for sale in tourist shops, while the national airline is Olympic Airways and ‘uses the Olympic rings as its logo’ (not true). Behind the scenes, the discourse could get even worse. LAOOC officials I subsequently interviewed did not shrink from insisting that ‘the Greeks just wanted more money from us’ in return for lighting the flame, and subsequent organizing committees came to hear this canard of HOC blackmail, 195.

⁴¹ In his 28 February proposal for a settlement, Ueberroth did briefly float the notion of sharing some of the torch relay proceeds with ‘a sport organization benefiting Greek youth’ that was ‘to be selected by Mrs Papandreou during her US visit and accorded a deserving and dignified press conference coordinated by the Greek government and the LAOOC’ (Ueberroth to Samaranch, IOC Archives, JO-1984S-FLAMT). Ueberroth clearly did not understand that any organization consenting to receive such funds would have no future in Greece. The whole matter of neo-imperialist capitalism in the OFR foreshadowed another huge controversy after the Olympic Games were concluded. Ueberroth, the LAOOC, and the USOC declared a profit of over $200 million, and then refused to even consider sharing any of it with the IOC, the NOCs that had participated, or the IFs. Instead, the money went exclusively to American non-profit institutions, a large endowment for the USOC and for what is today the LA‘84 foundation for youth sport in Southern California. This outraged Olympic leaders worldwide and helped insure that Ueberroth would never be elected to the IOC, despite Samaranch's resolve to have him there.

⁴² At Sarajevo, the IOC Executive Board generated a draft memo to the HOC affirming that the LAOOC's ‘request for use of the Olympic Flame has the full support of the IOC’ and demanding that the HOC cooperate with the LAOOC and certify in writing that it was doing so by a date certain. If not ‘the IOC shall be required to take such steps as may be required to establish the Olympic Flame at the [IOC] headquarters in Lausanne or such other location as may seem appropriate in the circumstances’ (IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT). The language could hardly have been harsher to the HOC. The IOC Executive now clearly felt that the dispute had called its own authority into serious question.

⁴³ At Sarajevo, the IOC Executive Board generated a draft memo to the HOC affirming that the LAOOC's ‘request for use of the Olympic Flame has the full support of the IOC’ and demanding that the HOC cooperate with the LAOOC and certify in writing that it was doing so by a date certain. If not ‘the IOC shall be required to take such steps as may be required to establish the Olympic Flame at the [IOC] headquarters in Lausanne or such other location as may seem appropriate in the circumstances’ (IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT). The language could hardly have been harsher to the HOC. The IOC Executive now clearly felt that the dispute had called its own authority into serious question, 204.

⁴⁴ Frequently transliterated in the foreign press as Foteinos, as many noted, the Greek word for ‘light’.

⁴⁵ Official Report, 815. Ueberroth, Made in America, 204; Stanley, ‘An Olympic Ideal Gets Burned’.

⁴⁶ See for example, ‘Flame Campaign Close to Greek Communist Party’, Reuters, April 26, 1984,

⁴⁷ Ueberroth, Made in America, 224.

⁴⁸ Ueberroth, Made in America, 220–1; Official Report, 815.

⁴⁹ Ueberroth said nothing about AT&T's sponsorship contract at all, much less about cancelling it, and so the Greek authorities who had also always objected to advertising as clear ‘commercialization’ could hardly certify the LA relay as non-commercial. (Ueberroth does not mention this complaint in his memoir.) In their 19 December1983 telex to Ueberroth, echoing their formal ‘sacrilege’ complaint to the IOC, Lembessis and Filaretos wrote, ‘Your argument that no commercialization exists whatsoever since no trademarks and no advertising on the outfits of the runners will take place is not valid’ (IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT). Indeed, it was not. Ueberroth knew perfectly well that highly visible company logos would be on the togs of the AT&T cadre runners, who would end up covering 60% of the relay and who would run continuously alongside every YLK runner (with their commercial free shirts). Thus, the AT&T brand would appear in every video and nearly every photograph of the torchbearers. Ueberroth commenced this prevarication in early December (Samaranch to Ueberroth, 9 December 1983, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT) and continued it throughout the negotiations in 1984. The lies ended only in June 1984, when the LAOOC sent a package of relay press clippings to Samaranch, showing the cadre runners Cathy Peterson, Dot Furley, and Kay Washburn carrying the flame in full AT&T kit and even including supplier advertisements using the OFR logo (IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT).

As to the second new condition, if he was at all serious in thinking that someone could by fiat command all Greek officials – ‘federal, municipal, or Olympic’ (Made in America, 221) – then Ueberroth was once again betraying his conception of contemporary Greece as some Third World totalitarian country (the Greece of the Colonels?) and not a complex and vibrant democracy.

⁵⁰ Interviews with Nissiotis, Filaretos, and three HOC staff members, June 1984.

⁵¹ A stereotypical complaint of foreign visitors is that ‘Greeks are always arguing’. Few imagine that what they are actually observing is Greeks performing their own conception of popular democracy. In persistently seeking from ‘the Greeks’ a once-and-for-all deal with no subsequent discussion permitted, Ueberroth and the LAOOC were displaying their cross-cultural ignorance and, in Greek terms, their own authoritarian ethos.

⁵² Ueberroth did not usually even speak personally over the phone with Greek officials, leaving that to ‘a successful Los Angeles businessman fluent in Greek’ (Made in America, 221). Ueberroth doubtless imagined that the LAOOC was being progressive in this, but all of the key Greek interlocutors spoke excellent English, and two of them later told me they felt insulted by being asked to discuss sensitive matters with and through a volunteer intermediary without any authority or background in Olympic affairs. Moreover, there are generic tensions between Greeks and Greek–Americans in such intercultural filters as region of origin, dialect, party affiliation, and religiosity. Mr Caloyeras's business success was all Ueberroth and his colleagues were apparently interested in when they selected their go-between.

⁵³ Tass dispatch 18 March 1984, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT. This must refer to a circulated petition as there were nowhere near 350 people at the Olympic conference.

⁵⁴ Press clippings file, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT.

⁵⁵ While not the chief plank in the international rhetorical groundwork being deployed to justify its eventual boycott of the Los Angeles Games, the importance of the LAOOC's flame relay to the Soviets was to made perfectly clear when they chose to have the announcement of the boycott precisely coincide with the relay's kick-off in New York.

⁵⁶ ‘It is not possible to hand over the Olympic flame and to organize the Olympic torch relay according to the traditional way … since, with few exception, it did not find the traditional cooperation of those public services [municipalities] the contribution of which were indispensable and since the sports organizations that had the duty to contribute to success declined to do so’. This was ‘a serious blow to the Olympic Movement and to our country’, and now it would be ‘up to the IOC to give the flame’ for the Los Angeles games'. (A. Tzantzanos to Samaranch, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT.)

⁵⁷ Press clippings, 3–6 May, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT. As the IOC Archives show, Samaranch had been in direct touch with Kimon Koularis, the general secretary for sport in the PASOK government, at various points in the process. Though the archives not surprisingly are silent on this, it would be my hunch that Samaranch dealt directly with President Karamanlis (of the centre-right party) during the end game.

⁵⁸ See note 52. In his memoir, Ueberroth boasted of an earlier ‘deal’ with Margaret Papandreou, the Prime Minister's wife in which she promised privately and on television ‘an orderly transfer of the flame to the LAOOC’ in return for accepting a troupe from the Greek National Theatre into the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. (Made in America, 221). The actual importance of this episode, like so much else in this story, cannot be properly evaluated until we have a full scholarly account based on the relevant Greek government archives. There is no question, however, of the Greek government's leading role in providing, at the last minute, a flame to LA.

⁵⁹ Some eyewitnesses claimed more than a thousand protestors, while others (such as Nassos Kritsinelis in ‘My Programme’, and ensuing in this volume) counted substantially fewer. In my interviews in Olympia, four weeks after the event, part of the discrepancy lay with those who counted villagers in solidarity with the demonstrators but were afraid to leave their homes and businesses unattended for fear of ensuing violence.

⁶⁰ Nikos Nissiotis and local police officials are my sources here. Again, it would be helpful to have a full study of the event based on official Greek presidential archives. In his memoir, Ueberroth was completely silent about the dangerous and nearly tragic situation at Olympia. The LAOOC's Official Report noted only that ‘heavy security was present at the ceremonial site’ (816).

⁶¹ Katerina Didaskalou, like all contemporary Olympic high priestesses, was a classically trained Greek actress and model, and in her case later a television drama star. I did not get a chance to meet or to interview her in 1984. But we travelled together on the OFR for Seoul, for which she reprised her role as flame-lighting high priestess and was the honoured guest throughout Korea of the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee and indeed of the entire Korean people (MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’). We became close friends, and it embittered me to hear that no one from Los Angeles had ever thanked her for risking her life to get them an authentic Olympic flame. ‘I don't think they even knew my name. No matter,’ she told me, ‘I did it for the Olympic movement and for my country’. Samaranch, for his part, wrote to her on 23 May, ‘You fulfilled your function with a great deal of dignity and solemnity, and the entire IOC is infinitely in your debt’. He also wrote individual letters of thanks to the HOC technical staff who had dared to assist: Kritsinelis, Georgos Moissides, Vasilios Karakisos, Perikles Paklatzidis, and Maria Horst [sic]. IOC Archives, JO-1984S-FLAMT.

⁶² See Skiadas, The Olympic Flame, for the photographic evidence. Nissiotis was there as Samaranch's official representative, and Filaretos as IOC member rather than HOC secretary general. The HOC could thus, when it suited, maintain the fiction with the public that it had not taken part in the ceremony. Szymiczek was the dean of the IOA (and was later thanked by letter from Samaranch for his key role in making the ceremony happen). But, his salary was in fact paid by the HOC, thinning the committee's cover even more. (Samaranch to Nissiotis, 26 April 1984; Samaranch to Szymiczek, 21 May 1984; IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT.)

⁶³ I had been visiting Ancient Olympia since 1977, and had established networks and projects in the village. For a discussion of these and of Nissiotis, the IOA, and my relations with them, see This Great Symbol, 323–8.

⁶⁴ See Nissiotis and Grigoris, Nikos A. Nissiotis.

⁶⁵ Regretably, I did not ask Nissiotis to detail his communications with Samaranch in setting up this secret flame lighting. On their arrival in Athens, Nissiotis sheltered and carefully instructed the emissaries from Lausanne as to what they must do in Olympia, but he judged it too risky for him to be there with them.

⁶⁶ Ueberroth, Made in America, 242. Whether Samaranch really was ‘chuckling’ as he said this, as Ueberroth later claimed, it is perfectly clear from his text that Ueberroth himself was at the time and still years later chortling.

⁶⁷ ‘Programme de remise de la flame olympique au LAOOC, 4–5 Mai’, IOC Archives, JO-1984s-FLAMT.

⁶⁸ There was in fact a third flame. As Nassos Kritsinelis reveals in this volume (MacAloon, ‘My Programme’), he had the back-up flame lit at the Olympia rehearsal secretly taken to Athens just in case demonstrators managed to overpower security and prevent the 7 May ceremony from taking place.

⁶⁹ There was in fact a third flame. As Nassos Kritsinelis reveals in this volume (MacAloon, ‘My Programme’), he had the back-up flame lit at the Olympia rehearsal secretly taken to Athens just in case demonstrators managed to overpower security and prevent the 7 May ceremony from taking place, 196, 227, 241–2, 245. Samaranch clearly did not trust Ueberroth with the full details. The persons on the mission to Greece from Lausanne were not ‘students on an Olympic project’ and required no ‘manual describing the ceremony for lighting the Olympic flame’. The photographs did not include their faces or torsos, only their hands performing the ritual acts with a small mirror, a candle, and a miner's lantern emblazoned with the Olympic rings, all with the unmistakable ruins of the Hera Temple in the background.

⁷⁰ Nissiotis, ‘L'Actualité de Pierre de Coubertin du point de vue de la philosophie el le problème de la religio athletae’.

⁷¹ Our proposal had been to add to the IOA schedule a four-week seminar for graduate students engaged in serious academic research on the Olympic movement. It took us until the summer of 1986 to begin to actually organize it, then in September, Nissiotis was killed in a car crash as he was returning from Olympia to Athens. A few years later, the seminar was actually inaugurated. As he was the IOA president at that time, Nikos Filaretos liked to claim credit as its originator.

⁷² Official Report, 815.

⁷³ Once the LAOOC had the back-up flame, Ueberroth indicates that Filaretos was directly informed. In an outrageously vindictive and childishly triumphal passage in his book, Ueberroth recalls instructing his underlings to ‘get Filaretos on the phone and make one last request for his help to arrange a flame-lighting ceremony at Olympia. If he refuses, tell him fine. Tell him we already have a flame, and we'd be pleased to tell the world how we snuck into Olympia and got it, if that's how he wants it. Also, mention that we've decided that Greece will march in alphabetical order at the opening ceremonies, instead of in its customary place – first in line’. Filaretos would never confirm with me that this conversation actually happened. But if it did, it is highly doubtful, as Ueberroth proceeds to claim, that this threat of using the secret flame rather than prior Greek government decision is the reason an Olympia flame ignition was agreed to. Indeed, if, as was reported to Ueberroth, ‘Filaretos even guaranteed Greek government support’, that could only be because the government had already decided there would be an Olympia ceremony. Ueberroth, Made in America, 242.

It is also uncertain whom Samaranch spoke with in Greece once he had an Olympic flame in Lausanne. Not surprisingly, the IOC archives are silent on this point. Michael Payne's account 20 years later reads like Chateau de Vidy office folklore, written in the same executive office master of the universe (schoolyard bully boy) tone as Ueberroth's. Payne writes that ‘Samaranch presented the Greek Committee with a simple choice. The Greeks were told to either allow Ueberroth to come to Olympia and light the flame in the traditional manner, or the IOC would dispatch the flame from the IOC headquarters in Lausanne. The Greek Committee accepted Samaranch's proposal’ (Olympic Turnaround, 127). Presumably, Payne means the HOC here, but I have my doubts that this is correct. Knowing Samaranch, it is far more likely that he was in communication with top Greek government officials over this, and not with Messrs. Lembessis and Filaretos for whom he had little political respect. Samaranch would have known perfectly well that by this point in the drama, the Greek government and not the HOC was calling the final shot.

⁷⁴ It is conceivable that as HOC secretary general, Filaretos received the secret flame ultimatum from Ueberroth, Samaranch, or both, and never communicated it to HOC president Lembessis or any others on the HOC board. If he had, I am quite certain that Kritsinelis (and other long-time HOC staffers I have talked with) would not still have been in the dark all these years later.

⁷⁵ After I published a summary account of these events in a new edition of This Great Symbol in 2008, I received an e-mail from the Olympic chronicler Wolf Lyberg, who had the temerity to request that, ‘as so much time had passed’, I tell him the two names so that he could enter them into Olympic history. Los Angeles businessmen and British brand managers at the IOC are not the only ones who sometimes just do not get it about Greece and the Olympic flame.

⁷⁶ See Barney, Wenn, and Martyn, Selling the Five Rings for a scholarly and Payne, Olympic Turnaround for a practitioner account.

⁷⁷ The LAOOC had been so bold as to have included in its 22 July 1983 contract with the HOC a provision (1.5) that the latter would ‘render assistance in obtaining seats in the relay motorcade [in Greece] to a group of representatives from LAOOC's designated suppliers of equipment for the Olympic Flame Relay … providing them with meals and other necessary service. No publicity whatsoever of said designated suppliers will be allowed in Greece’. IOC Archives, JO-1984S-FLAMT.

⁷⁸ Battle finished the Atlanta Olympic Games with the strongest international reputation of any of the ACOG officers. Because he is personal friends with so many Olympic leaders around the world, Battle subsequently became and is today a much sought-after consultant to Olympic bid committees, having worked with Beijing, New York, Sochi, Chicago, and Pyeongyang.

⁷⁹ One such ally was Nikolaos Yalouris, the famous senior archaeologist of the ancient Peloponnese, including Olympia, and long-time ephor of the IOA whom I had grown close to over the years. Steven Miller, the distinguished archaeologist and classical historian of sport from California-Berkeley, was another such ally. As the excavator of Nemea and the ancient Nemean Games, as well as the founder of the New Nemean Games, Stephen was (and is) highly respected and even loved in the central Peloponnese. He deployed his own networks on our behalf and brought a large and supportive delegation from Nemea to the Atlanta flame lighting at Olympia.

⁸⁰ MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 323–5.

⁸¹ In fact, it was Ueberroth who could have been accused of cooking the books. After Samaranch requested to know the detailed LAOOC outlay to the HOC, Ueberroth gave a figure of $509,377.50, but $322,000 of this turned out to be for the chartered plane and other ‘travel expenses for [the LAOOC delegation] to Greece’. Ueberroth to Samaranch 27 February 1984, IOC Archives, JO-1984S-FLAMT.

⁸² As did two other Americans, Rusty Wilson an IOA graduate who was Kritsinelis's personal guest, and an American filmmaker making a documentary that unfortunately was never completed.

⁸³ For example, in 1992, COOB officials had flown back to Athens after the flame lighting, leaving no one to accompany the flame on its journey there through the Greek towns and villages. As a consequence, Kritsinelis had to ask the American anthropologist along on the relay to impersonate a COOB official in order that someone could politely receive the memorial gifts conventionally offered by the municipalities for a successful Barcelona Olympics. This ruse was embarrassing for both of us.

⁸⁴ See MacAloon, ‘My Programme’, in this volume.

⁸⁵ ‘I stressed with them that this was our celebration of the 100th anniversary of 1896. If they didn't want the relay in their town, because it was a flame for Atlanta, then, fine, we would go through another town. In the end, no one refused’. Personal communication, April 1996. The OFR celebrations in Greek villages and towns, of course gave local mayors and other dignitaries the opportunity to make speeches to large crowds who had had another festival day added to their calendars. Simply by doing his duty as HOC flame relay director, Kritsinelis became a key ambassador on ACOG's behalf through his unparalleled network of local contacts in southern and central Greece.

⁸⁶ Hirthler today makes much of his living as a transnational Olympic bid and Olympic Games marketing consultant.

⁸⁷ In this case, the Greek Olympian long jumper Kostas Koukodimos.

⁸⁸ Readers unfamiliar with the role of the radical Christian right in American politics might find such missives laughable, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation took very seriously some of the more threatening ones. After the Centennial Park bomber was identified, it appeared wise to have done so.

⁸⁹ In the event, the White House entourage presented a good deal of inconvenience for the spectators, but remarkably little for the ritual directors and personnel. Most citizens of Olympia were grateful for increased excitement, crowds, press coverage, and (so they believed) future tourist business the White House presence created.

⁹⁰ The first phase of the rite takes place on the floor of the ancient stadium and consists of the Olympic anthem, the national anthems of Greece and the Olympic host nation, an invocation by an Orthodox priest, followed by speeches by HOC, Greek government, municipal, and OCOG officials. After this first phase is concluded, the high dignitaries enter the sanctuary through the ancient athletes' tunnel (krypte) to witness from a respectful distance the high priestess's appeal in ancient Greek to Apollo as the god of light and the actual flame lighting with her own special torch held to the mirror. In the third phase, the dignitaries return to their seats in the stadium to await the high priestess, who accompanied by her attendants in highly stylized choreography, bears the flame in a vase into the stadium, lights again her own special torch, and after another declamation and the flight of a dove, reaches her torch across a symbolic boundary between the ancient and modern worlds to ignite the OCOG torch of the first flame bearer, a famous Greek athlete who sets off for the Coubertin grove and then on to the relay route to Athens.

Over the years, I have pressed NBC Television Olympics chief Dick Ebersol as to why he has never permitted American audiences to view the flame-lighting ceremony in its entirety. All that Americans, including Greek–Americans, have ever been allowed to see is a brief clip of the core dramatic moment when the flame comes alive in the mirror and the priestess lifts up her torch to the sky. Unlike all other national broadcasters in recent years, American network television behaves this way even when the flame is being lit for a US Games. Ebersol always answers that he saw the ritual once and found it ‘boring’. When pressed, it is clear that he is talking about the first phase of anthems and speeches that, to be sure, would be a challenge to make into what the US commercial networks like to call ‘good television’. But priestesses bringing down fire from heaven in storied ancient ruins can hardly be described as boring, so some other inhibition must be at play. And it is a general one, for even with no rights-holding barrier to doing so, neither Atlanta-based CNN nor any local broadcaster sent a camera team to Olympia or purchased footage of the whole ceremony from the Greek broadcaster ERT. All of them showed only the standard moment, a couple adding the briefest clip of Hillary Clinton at the podium. Though Ebersol for his part denies it, I am convinced that political fear of offending the American religious right and dealing with its demands for ‘equal time’ is the chief factor at play here, however consciously. I offer the influence of this threat on Mrs Clinton's behaviour at Olympia as evidence.

⁹¹ Nikolaou had for some years avoided even speaking to me at the IOA or at OFR events in Greece. Perhaps I had somehow offended him. There was certainly the matter of my nationality, and in those days Nikolaou could be ‘anti-hegemonist’ when it availed him. But, I think the difficulty was first of all that I was so closely associated with the man he was trying to replace as IOC member, and second because I had such friendly relations with HOC and IOA employees, such as Kritsinelis and Didaskalou, and did what I could to make their work better known internationally. Nikolaou had Katerina replaced as high priestess after she outshined the other Greek Olympic leaders at the Seoul Olympic Games, and, as discussed in ‘My Programme’ in this volume, Nikolaou subjected Kritsinelis to the same treatment in 2000 after all the international adulation Nassos received in 1996. Only in the past few years, while I was on the Chicago 2016 international relations team and when Nikolaou had become IOC vice president, a post Nissiotis had not attained, did relations warm up somewhat between us.

⁹² Kostalas did his university work in philology and economics in the USA. A talented musician, he is perhaps best known outside of Greece as the long-time spokesman of the country during the Eurovision Song contest.

⁹³ According to the IOC Archives, Otto Szymiczek had played a key organizational role in the Olympia flame-lighting ‘ceremony’ for Los Angeles. Samaranch to Szymiczek, 20 May 1984. JO-1884S-FLAMT. So, there was a certain irony in his son's presence and performance here.

⁹⁴ Skiadas, Thee Olympic Flame, 151.

⁹⁵ Some details are provided in the ensuing article ‘My Programme’. For readers of Norwegian, an anthropological study of local OFR celebrations and their cultural logics during the Lillehammer relay can be found in Klausen, et al., Fakel-Stafetten.

⁹⁶ Andronicos, Vergina, for the archaeology of this tomb.

⁹⁷ Personal communications, Steven McCarthy and Nassos Kritsinelis, 2002–03.