On 20 July 1936, in the ruins of ancient Olympia, actresses dressed as Greek priestesses used a parabolic mirror to focus the sun's rays and kindle a flame. A runner carried it away, the first of more than three thousand torchbearers who would each cover roughly a kilometre through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the athlete Fritz Schilgen jogged into Berlin's Olympic Stadium on 1 August and lit the cauldron. The ceremony looked timeless, a ritual handed down from antiquity. It was nothing of the sort. The Olympic torch relay was brand new — conceived for the Nazi Games, staged by the Nazi state and stamped with its politics from the first spark.
The ancient Games did keep a sacred fire burning at Olympia, at the altar of the goddess Hestia, and Greek religious festivals in Athens featured torch races known as lampadedromia, run in honour of Prometheus and other gods. But no ancient runner ever carried a flame from Olympia to the Games. Even in the modern era the flame came before the relay: a symbolic Olympic fire first burned at Amsterdam in 1928, atop the stadium's Marathon Tower, and again at Los Angeles in 1932 — lit locally, with no journey attached.
Made in Berlin
The relay was the idea of Carl Diem, the veteran sports administrator who served as secretary-general of the Berlin organising committee. Joseph Goebbels's propaganda ministry embraced it, for the concept fitted the regime's obsession with casting Germany as heir to classical Greece. The steel torches, designed to burn magnesium so the flame would survive wind and rain, were manufactured by Krupp — the armaments firm. Leni Riefenstahl restaged parts of the lighting and the relay for her film Olympia, turning the journey into cinematic myth. Historians have often noted the grim postscript: within six years, German armies had marched back along much of the relay's route — through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece — as invaders or occupiers.
After the war, the relay faced an obvious question: should a Nazi invention survive? London's austerity Games of 1948 answered by rebranding rather than abolishing. The relay was styled a "Relay of Peace", and in a pointed piece of theatre the first torchbearer, a Greek army corporal named Dimitrelis, laid down his weapons and uniform before taking up the flame. The ceremony's origins faded from public memory with remarkable speed, and the relay was quietly retconned into "ancient tradition" — a textbook case of what historians call an invented tradition doing exactly what invented traditions do.
The flame goes travelling
Since then the relay has generated its own genuine lore. The Winter Games initially looked elsewhere for their fire: for Oslo 1952 the flame was lit not at Olympia but in the hearth of a cottage in Morgedal, Norway, birthplace of the skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim. For Montreal 1976 the organisers pulled off the strangest relay of all — the flame was converted into an electronic signal, transmitted from Athens to Ottawa by satellite, and used to trigger a laser that relit it on Canadian soil. When a rainstorm later doused the cauldron mid-Games, an official relit it with his cigarette lighter; horrified organisers extinguished that profane flame and rekindled it from a backup lantern, for a reserve flame lit at Olympia always travels with the relay. The fire has since journeyed by Concorde, dogsled and camel, and in 2000 the diver Wendy Craig Duncan carried a flare-borne flame underwater across part of the Great Barrier Reef for the Sydney Games.
The relay has also kept its capacity for politics. The Beijing 2008 organisers sent the torch on a vast international journey that was met by protests over Tibet in London, Paris and San Francisco, with the flame at times extinguished or diverted; afterwards the IOC scrapped global legs altogether, confining future relays to Greece and the host country. Even the ritual's guardians, in other words, have repeatedly rediscovered what Berlin knew from the start — that a travelling flame is never just a flame.
The lighting ceremony at Olympia, with its costumed priestesses and solar mirror, is still performed for every Games, summer and winter — a ritual younger than many of its spectators, faithfully reproducing a scene first choreographed for the Third Reich. That is the relay's uncomfortable double life: an emblem of peace and continuity whose actual pedigree runs through Goebbels's ministry and Krupp's forges. The flame, as ever, illuminates whatever its bearers wish to see.
Quiz nuggets
- The first Olympic torch relay was staged for Berlin 1936, devised by organiser Carl Diem, with over 3,000 runners crossing seven countries.
- An Olympic flame burned earlier — first at Amsterdam 1928 — but with no relay attached.
- The 1936 magnesium-burning torches were made by the arms manufacturer Krupp, and Fritz Schilgen lit the Berlin cauldron.
- For Oslo 1952 the winter flame was lit in Morgedal, Norway — home of skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim — not at Olympia.
- Montreal 1976: the flame was sent from Athens to Ottawa as a satellite signal and relit by laser; a rain-doused cauldron was briefly relit with a cigarette lighter.