‘My programme became very strict’: a conversation with Athanassios Kritsinelis

Abstract

Athanassios (Nassos) Kritsinelis is known and respected across the world as the dean of Olympic Flame Relay (OFR) practice. As OFR technical director and manager, first for the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) and then for the 2004 Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC), he has for over 30 years been the most notable on-the-ground guardian and innovator of Greek OFR traditions, as well as the chief Greek interlocutor with the succession of Olympic Games Organizing Committees (OCOGs) receiving the flame. Kritsinelis was the main ATHOC planner for the Athens 2004 relay. He was also a tragic casualty when the transnational, ‘world's best practices’ operational regime that had evolved out of prior, largely Anglo-Saxon OFRs was brought to bear in Athens.

Notes

¹ This interview took place in Athens in October, 2006, and was supplemented by phone through July, 2009. Pinelopi Amelidou collaborated in the interview and Jessica Robinson was chiefly responsible for the transcription, services for which both Nassos Kritsinelis and the interviewer are most grateful. This text has been edited from a much longer transcript and contains spliced quotations.

² There is no dispute among specialist scholars that plans for the relay well antedated the Nazi government and that the IOC gave final approval during its meetings in Greece in 1934 (see Borgers, Olympic Torch Relays, 13–26). Borgers does note that de Coubertin himself once thought that Philadelpheas, not Diem, was the chief author of the idea, and how concerned Germans were to correct him (Olympic Torch Relays, 18.) Barney and Bijerk, ‘The Genesis of Sacred Fire’, do a much better job of properly estimating the central contributions of Greek scholars and pedagogues to the ritual architecture of the flame relay. These facts condition still today the deep outrage among Greeks when foreign iconoclasts tendentiously assert that the OFR is ‘a Nazi invention’. Arguments have instead surrounded which particular IOC/Greek meeting was most important in the approval process: the May 18 session in Athens, a May 22 lunch at Tegea where the relay was again discussed, or a May 23 banquet at Olympia.

In a speech to the IOA in 1996, Kritsinelis largely took at face value a memorial plaque erected in 1934 by the citizens of Tegea and their contemporaneous town hall register. The Tegeans understood then (and today) that it was in their town that the flame relay idea consolidated and the IOC took its decision (Kritsinelis, ‘Lighting Ceremony of the Olympic Flame’). Kritsinelis did not deny the importance of the other meetings in this series, but felt that this local history, largely unknown outside Greece, should be honoured, as he also later did by arranging a special Tegea celebration during the 1996 Centennial OFR for Atlanta.

Karl Lennartz of the German Sports University in Cologne subsequently disputed the significance of the Tegea meeting in an article in the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH) newsletter (‘The Genesis of Legends’). Fair enough, but unfortunately Lennartz did not stop himself from going on to suggest, rather rudely and without informing himself as to the identity of the author, that Mr Kritsinelis produced only ‘nonsense’ and, moreover, that non-academic ‘historians’ should not be published at all lest they generate ‘legends’. As a fieldwork cultural anthropologist, I did indeed object to such presumption and disrespect for ritual experts and folk histories. Moreover, there was an element of the pot calling the kettle black here, as neither Lennartz nor most other ISOH members have advanced degrees in history. Instead they tend to be physical educationists or sportspersons whose historiography is limited to a radical originology. Rather than multiple historical narratives constituted by and relevant to understanding different cultural contexts and intercultural conflicts, for these writers there is but one point source of institutional origins to be discovered exclusively in documentary evidence. For practitioners of anthrohistory, this is naive empiricism of a kind that would make von Ranke blush (see MacAloon, ‘Postscript’).No one disputes the usefulness of facts-and-figures history, but it can scarcely arrive at any challenging interpretive findings by itself and requires just as much inference as popular histories do to arrive at important significances. (It is hardly accidental that ISOH is presently the only research organization related to the human sciences that retains IOC patronage.) Under these epistemological conditions nationalist undertones inevitably creep in, and Greece and Germany are not just any nations in this context. The Kritsinelis–Lennartz dispute embodies a well-known deep structure of modern rivalry over the classical heritage memorably styled by E.M. Butler (in her 1958 book of this title ‘The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany’), here reactivated by Olympic invention of tradition. The continuing German archaeological mandate at Olympia, the joint foundation of the IOA by Diem and Ketseas, the large German presence at the IOA over the years: these are among conditions that have led to a widespread Greek perception of a tyranny of Germany over Greece. In summary, there remains still today a deep and bilateral tension between Germans and Greeks over a historically privileged right to interpret Olympic affairs, including especially the OFR.

³ See MacAloon, ‘This Flame, Our Eyes: Greek/American/IOC Relations, 1984–2002’, this volume.

⁴ See MacAloon, ‘Postscript’ and ‘Introduction’, this volume. Also, Ueberroth, Made in America, 241–5; Payne, Olympic Turnaround, 126–7.

⁵ This was the brilliant and charismatic Greek actress Katerina Didaskalou, who endured serious threats of bodily and career harm for serving as the ritual priestess amidst the controversy with the Americans. Later, after she performed the same ritual services for Seoul, she was invited (indeed expected by Korean authorities) to tour South Korea with the flame. We travelled together and had many interviews and casual conversations, and in statements echoed by high priestesses before and after her, Katerina always said in public and in private that while she always knew perfectly well that she was a (classically trained) stage and television actress, when she performed as the priestess ‘she became the priestess’. I was privileged to observe first-hand how the day-to-day adulation of Korean publics, both popular and elite, transformed Katerina Didaskalou's experience of herself in a way familiar to anthropologists from, for example, Lévi-Strauss' account (‘The Sorcerer and his Magic’) of how the Kwakiutl Quesalid became a shaman.I also observed how irritated the top HOC officials and Greek IOC members could become when – to repeat the expression I have heard them use several times in such contexts over the years – mere HOC ‘employees’ garner greater transnational recognition and attention than their bosses do. I was assured by an IOC member in Greece, when I later enquired, that Didaskalou was not invited back as priestess after Seoul ‘because we just like to change’. However, other insiders insisted that these male leaders felt she had become too well known and too ‘big’ for her role. The intense respect and friendship Nassos Kritsinelis himself had earned abroad, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, may likewise have contributed to the decision of Lambis Nikolaou to put Kritsinelis on the bench for 2000 Sydney OFR.Of course, status rivalries between superiors and line staff are evident in any organization, but in this Greek context, ritual is involved. The relevant ‘staff’ are also ritual actors and become known to outsiders as such, not as someone else's ‘employees’. Moreover, there is no official role for the IOC members in Greece in the conventional OFR rituals and the president of the HOC only makes a preliminary speech outside the sanctuary at the Olympia flame lighting and hands over the lantern to the president of the OCOG in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. Otherwise, these top officials are not ritually marked and are rarely to be seen out on the relay. In these facts and relations lie certain clues, I believe, as to why the Hellenic Olympic leadership was so surprisingly willing in Athens 2004, as Kritsinelis says, not just to capitulate to but even to augment the ‘foreign’, ‘tasteless’, and ‘sacrilegious’ OFR practices they had previously claimed moral authority for resisting.

⁶ See MacAloon, ‘Greek-American-IOC Relations’, this volume.

⁷ Ordinary spectators (and unaccredited cameramen) can choose to observe directly the actual flame-lighting moment by positioning themselves not in the stadium but on the road looking down on the altis from the flank of the Kronos Hill.The career of Maria Hors as a widely admired choreographer, ritual officiant, and senior priestess stretches back through the entire existence of the flame-lighting ceremony, her having appeared as a young girl in the initial performance in 1936.

⁸ See Herzfeld, Ours Once More; Fermor, Roumeli; MacAloon, This Great Symbol.

⁹ Institutional relations among the HOC, the political parties, and the government in Greece have been extremely complicated through recent decades. To simplify, the leadership of the HOC has changed with the governmental ruling party, except that if the government changes during an Olympic year, the existing HOC administration stays put until the Games are concluded. Entering the Olympic year of 2000, the HOC like the government was PASOK-dominated, and HOC president Lambis Nikolaou took the flame relay reins away from Kritsinelis in what was as much a gesture of arbitrary personal as of political power, somewhat typical of this mercurial Greek sports leader through his career. Though Nea Demokratia (NEA) won the government back from PASOK early in 2004, Nikolaou and his team remained in charge through the flame-lighting ceremony and initial relay segment from Olympia to Athens. By this time Kritsinelis was with ATHOC not the HOC and so would not have been formally in charge of these rituals in any case, the HOC guarding closely its own historical prerogative. ATHOC took control of the second and third segments of the relay, the international segment and the tour of Greece that ended in the Olympic opening ceremony, with the HOC having only a monitoring role. By the time of these events, as discussed in our interview, Kritsinelis had been effectively put under ‘house arrest’ by his ATHOC superiors.

¹⁰ This ‘media platform’ made its appearance as a regular part of the caravan in 1984. It was present again in Calgary 1988, though it tended to stay well ahead of the torchbearer most of the time, thus blocking everyone's view less frequently. In the Seoul OFR, a truck full of media was allowed periodically to approach the torchbearer from the side, or occasionally to go in front, but then it was shooed away. It was by no means a permanent part of the caravan, always just in front of the torchbearer and, therefore, always blocking the crowd and the torchbearer's views of one another. This practice came into being with Barcelona and especially with Atlanta, where the media truck was a permanent presence, always just a few feet ahead of the runner. The justifications for this controversial practice are discussed in my interview with Steven McCarthy elsewhere in this edition. Perhaps not incidentally, Kodak, Inc. had become an official supplier of the media van and mounted its own promotions in Atlanta and later in Salt Lake City. The appearance of a lumbering media truck just ahead of the runner in the 2004 Athens relay caused some shock right from the beginning. For example, citizens of Olympia Dimitri and Franca Karabelas complained bitterly to me about the difficulty of seeing their son carry the flame, as one of the first 2004 torchbearers in Olympia. ‘Why was this big truck there? We have never seen such a thing before’.

¹¹ Actually Kritsinelis tried an innovation on the Greek segment of the Barcelona relay that turned out to be more than problematic. He tried to copy a practice he saw and liked in Korea, where every handover across a marked civic–political boundary was formalized between the mayors of the cities or governors of the regions (see MacAloon and Kang, ‘Uri Nara’). But the prefects of Elis and Achaia did not collaborate the way Kritsinelis expected. In the very different political culture of Greece, they turned the episode in a representational power struggle with each other. Kritsinelis cancelled the innovation for the rest of the relay and was more careful about cross-cultural OFR borrowing thereafter. Ironically, unbeknownst to Kritsinelis, the Catalans later did the same thing at the boundaries of prefectures and autonomous communities in Spain, what they called the ‘institutional relays’ that in Madrid included the King and Queen.

¹² This folk saying really has the force of a curse. Literally ‘the flame, your eyes’, it means ‘if you hurt this flame may you go blind’. I learned the expression after hearing many old people shout it at Kritsinelis and the other officials on the 1992 relay for Barcelona. When the time came to put some Greek into Billy Payne's Olympia speech, I suggested to him that he end with the statement ‘The flame, our eyes; the flame, my eyes’. He understood immediately and at Olympia he delivered the line with a passionate sincerity that brought many among the 30,000 present that day to their feet amidst a general acclamation that put paid to long years of Greek and American Olympic conflict embodied in the OFR. See MacAloon, ‘Greek/American/IOC Relations’, in this volume.

¹³ My experience with Kritsinelis had taught me that Olympic and government officials turned up late on the eve of the ceremony and often tried to change the arrangements already made. Sure enough, in such a late night session after all the rest of the Atlanta delegation had retired, Marton Simitsek arrived and announced that on the morrow only Mrs Clinton's speech would be translated from Greek to English. I objected and reminded him that this would entirely be against protocol. He argued that the speech of the OCOG chief was never translated. I told him this was completely wrong and mentioned some lines from Pascal Maragall's speech in 1992. Simitsek glowered and backed off, and Billy Payne's speech was translated appropriately into Greek the next day, my having worked closely on this with Alexis Kostalas, Greek television personality and the HOC's talented interpreter. Simitsek is the Hellenized version of Szymiczek, Marton's father being Otto Symiczek, the long time dean of the IOA whom I knew for many years.

¹⁴ ‘I recommended to Rogge that we allow the Greeks to proceed [with the global relay] but on two conditions. The first was that we find sponsors to fund the $50 million budget for the relay so that it did not put a strain on the operation of the Games. Coke and Samsung were quickly persuaded to back the project. The second precondition was that the Greeks outsource the operation of the global relay and getting the Olympic flame back to Greece on time to an experienced operator. It was not that the Greeks could not do it themselves, but every capable executive was required back in Athens to prepare for the Games. I gave the organizers the names of two executives who had successfully staged previous Olympic relays … The ATHOC team … fully accepted the IOC's dictate … George Bolos, who had by now proved himself highly effective at delivering the Athens marketing programme, was tasked with taking over the management of the torch relay. He selected Steve McCarthy and his company Além’ (Payne, Olympic Turnaround, 267—8).This passage is disingenuous in certain respects. Coca-Cola and Samsung hardly needed to be ‘persuaded’. Coke was fiercely lobbying on all fronts to get hold of this ‘presenting partner’ sponsorship. The fact that Di Henry was associated with the rejection of Coca-Cola as a sponsor for the Sydney relay, a development from which the company was still smarting, while Steve McCarthy had successfully cooperated with Coke during the Atlanta and Salt Lake relays contextualized the outsourcing deliberations on all sides. The notion that ATHOC simply accepted ‘dictates’ from the IOC is hardly true, as this Kritsinelis interview, the leak of Payne's correspondence to the press, and the parliamentary debate alone make plain. During his tenure, Michael Payne spent no time ‘on the ground’ with the flame relay. Moreover, his book was written after his departure from the IOC, and like many in his profession, he cannot always stop marketing himself. Dictat certainly does, however, represent the wishful fantasies of the IOC throughout the Samaranch years. As Payne acknowledges (Olympic Turnaround, 125–31), the IOC was slow to understand the power and significance of the OFR, and he correctly attributes, in my judgment, the IOC's growing attention to the relay and getting Greek relay forces under more control to the dramas of Los Angeles 1984.By late 2006, Payne could be more sceptical of the IOC/Coca-Cola relationship around the flame relay, as consolidated in August 2005 contract extending Coke's Olympic sponsorship for an unprecedented 12 years. In a November 2006 interview with me in Lausanne, Payne revealed that this contract contains an explicit first right of refusal for all subsequent flame relay sponsorships. While for Payne, this only ‘makes the de facto, de jure’, it explicitly tied the hands – as Beijing was shortly to find out – of any OCOG wishing to follow Sydney and Lillehammer in refusing to give a consumer products company its flame relay sponsorship. In 2006, Payne himself was more concerned with other areas in which, in his opinion, ‘the Rogge regime gave away the store to Coke’ in this contract.

¹⁵ The change of government was a key factor, many would say the chief factor, in the unexpected success of the Athens Olympics. The new government had every incentive to expose the actual state of the Olympic planning, construction, and finances left behind by the PASOK regime and to mobilize every resource so that NEA would not be tarnished by a failed Games just a few months after taking power.

¹⁶ A succession of OCOGs has asked me where I think they should take the OFR in their countries. I always respond, ‘What in your country would the Olympic flame want to see?’ Relay officials have later told me that this suggestion has always turned out to be a useful guide, whatever eyebrows it initially raised. Listening to Nassos Kritsinelis' exegeses of his destination choices was one inspiration for this pedagogical slogan that has now become a part of flame relay community culture.

¹⁷ See Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics. Unlike many classicists and classical archaeologists who shy away from any inventions of tradition evoking the ancient world in modern form, such as the OFR, Miller, the distinguished University of California excavator of Nemea, has been an ardent participant and producer of this sort of ‘restored behaviour’ (see Figure 2). He was, with Kritsinelis, the main designer of the powerful celebrations in the ancient stadium at Nemea for the 2004 OFR. When the flame caravan moved on that day, Sara Brewster and I stayed on in the excavation workshops for a deeply moving traditional party that the local villagers, priests, mayors, and Prof. Miller gave for one another. In other years, Miller's ‘New Nemean Games’ have given hundreds of Greek school children and ordinary people from around the world – not to mention the financial supporters of his excavations – the opportunity to race in sandals and tunic down the actual floor of an ancient Greek stadium.

¹⁸ A.D. Frazier, Jr was an investment banker who became the chief operating and financial officer of the Atlanta Olympic Games, himself raising or managing over $1 billion in private financing. Since 1996, Frazier has subsequently stayed away from anything Olympic, except in 2002, when he carried the Olympic flame and made the end-of-day celebration speech in Chicago as a part of the Salt Lake City OFR.

¹⁹ Non-Olympian celebrities are contracted by sponsors and in return for the privilege and publicity of carrying the flame appear at associated sponsor events and promotions. By focusing on these persons, media do their part to further highlight sponsor participation and ‘value’. For example, on the licensed website of a for-profit supplier of relay photos, the international relay torchbearers highlighted include Naomi Campbell, Sir Richard Branson, Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, Jon Kabira, Emi Takeuchi, Ellen DeGeneres, Sylvester Stallone, and Tom Cruise, some captioned as participating in a ‘Samsung Olympic Torch Relay Celebration’. (www.wireimage.com/GalleryListing, accessed May 14, 2007).

²⁰ Interview with Marc Maes, Beijing, July 2006. A respected sport manager and leader in the Olympic Academy movement, Dr. Maes was invited to contribute to this volume, but circumstances prevented him from doing so. In our interview, he further told me that in his report to the IOC, which has remained confidential, he complained on behalf of the European NOCs about eventual financial costs to them that they felt the ATHOC/Além advance team had promised would be borne by Coca-Cola and Samsung. In our August, 2006 interviews, Além president Steve McCarthy strongly denied that there was ever any confusion on financing or backtracking with the international relay NOCs after their advance meetings.

²¹ A few days after this interview with Kritsinelis, I raised this matter with Gilbert Felli, Executive Director of the Olympic Games, at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne. Felli was also taken aback by these numbers and agreed that the situation had to be remedied. Perhaps in response, BOCOG's 25 June 2007 press release announcing torchbearer selection policies for the Beijing relay stressed ‘transparency’ and specified that among the ‘selection entities’, the ‘presenting partners’ (Coke, Samsung, Lenovo) would choose 6000 out of the 21,880 torchbearers and 750 out of the 5000 escort runners. (BOCOG website http://torchrelay.beijing2008.cn/en/torchbearers, accessed on July 2, 2007).

²² M. Douglas Ivester, Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO. Mr Ivester had actually retired as CEO in 2000, but was still serving as a company adviser in the period Kritsinelis is discussing.

²³ Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 141–2.

²⁴ The increasingly transnational character of Olympic Games administrative work is a main theme of the essays in this volume. This trend can be artificially exaggerated by the ‘world's best practices’ managerial ideology and by specific interventions by IOC headquarters. After Samaranch issued his famous ‘yellow card’ to ATHOC over the worrisome delays in its preparations, pressure mounted on the Greeks to accept highly paid consultants from SOCOG who were being pressed upon them by the IOC managerial staff. Sydney was a successful Olympics and some experience is certainly better than none. However, the notion that good management practices are free of cultural context, that what worked in Australia will work in Greece, or what worked in Greece will work in The People's Republic of China can prove to be the height of naiveté and even folly. ATHOC certainly learned from watching SOCOG, but it also wasted a pile of money on arrogant and ethnocentric Australian consultants who added little or no value to the Athenian project. Former OCOG officials who try to sell their services as consultants to subsequent OCOGs are rarely modest or precise, in my experience, about their past responsibilities and achievements. Instead they seem to count condescendingly on the supposed naiveté of the next group of foreigners down the line. I can testify first-hand how we in Chicago, during our recent Olympic bid, received on a nearly daily basis solicitations from would-be consultants the majority of whom seemed not to imagine that we already knew or were one phone call away from knowing just how exaggerated their claims of expertise could be.

²⁵ During interviews with high BOCOG officials in Beijing in July 2006, an experienced European colleague and I were repeatedly pressed as to whether there was not some way to avoid Coca-Cola as a flame relay sponsor in China. These Chinese officials were highly aware of the problems Coke operatives had caused out on past relays and were concerned by the fact that during the Torino OFR earlier that year, there had occurred the very first attacks in history on the relay caravan itself by political protesters. These included Italians who singled out Coke as the emblem of what they took to be rapacious neo-liberal globalization threatening their regional ecology with unwanted development projects.I could only speculate as to what additional national political and cultural considerations were at work behind our Chinese colleagues' concerns, but I left convinced that such things were also very important to them. Our BOCOG interlocutors clearly indicated that they preferred only national sponsors for their OFR, but that they would need five or more to make this financially viable. The IOC, they told us, was insisting that this would be too many sponsors and would result in disruption and ‘sponsor clutter’. So BOCOG felt pressured by the IOC to accept Coke and Samsung.I only learned four months later about Coke's right of first refusal of flame relay sponsorship established in its most recent contract with the IOC, and I have no idea whether our BOCOG interlocutors knew about this at the time of our conversations. In any case, we sensed that our BOCOG OFR friends were pessimistic about the likelihood of evading Coke, and that they probably sensed the same pessimism from us.Some months later, it was announced that Samsung would be the ‘presenting partner’ on the international segment of the Beijing 2008 OFR, while Coke would be the presenting partner on the domestic China relay. A high IOC official gave me to understand that this was a very positive outcome, because Samsung was far less likely to inspire protests along the international route than Coke, while Coke got what it really wanted, further prestigious exposure to the Chinese domestic market. BOCOG, he further asserted, would benefit from Coke's operational expertise in flame relays. Maxxam Ltd, Além's rival as an international OFR operations firm, collaborated on the international segment of the Beijing relay – which as we know and as is analysed elsewhere in the volume – was thrown into chaos by worldwide protests against China's crackdown on Tibet.