Struggling to celebrate: management of the 2004 Olympic Flame Relay segment in Greece

Abstract

This article offers a first-hand account of the experiences of an advance manager of the flame relay team of the Athens Olympic Games Organizing Committee (ATHOC). It covers the first and third segments of this relay within Greece and offers a focused description of the standard celebration events that punctuated the passage of the Olympic Flame. Organizational and managerial successes and failures shape the public experience of the Olympic Flame Relay (OFR), and the celebrations join the local and the global into performances of special demographic and symbolic power. In the model adopted for the 2004 OFR, these celebrations offered particular targets of attention for the various stakeholders (ATHOC departments, commercial sponsors, national government cultural officials, local authorities, and police). Power struggles among the various stakeholders are analysed, and the tactics deployed by sponsors to win these struggles are particularly revealed in a case study of the battle over the relay anthem. This article provides a rare published account of the experience of being a flame relay staff organizer under the emergent ‘world's best practices’ model.

Notes

¹ 25 March 1821 was the day that the Greeks started their revolution against the Ottoman Empire.

² These kiosks formed the bases for all of the ‘activation’, that is to say promotion activities of the sponsors: handing out or selling merchandise, playing music and videos, arranging contests for the spectators, etc. The reader should not imagine small newspaper kiosks, but rather more or less elaborate temporary stages and awnings (see Figure 1).

³ For example, playing a jingle during the mandatory silent period.

⁴ Pass the Flame, Unite the World was produced and composed by Trevor Horn.

⁵ The promotional balloons a sponsor had given to the crowd made the job of the TV crew difficult, as they disturbed the live national broadcast of the protocol ceremony.

⁶ The original statue of Nike of Samothraki is currently exhibited in the main lobby of The Louvre in Paris.

⁷ The father of Alexander the Great.