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A beautiful reminder that even the most inane components of sports can make for good advertising.

From the NY Times in 2004:

The torch relay that culminates in the ceremonial lighting of the flame at the Olympic stadium was ordered by Adolf Hitler, who tried to make the 1936 Berlin Games a celebration of the Third Reich. Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine also popularized the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the Games.

Now, both are universally recognized icons of the Olympics. But historians say neither had much, if anything, to do with the Games born centuries ago in ancient Olympia.

“The torch relay is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition - unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin,” the author Tony Perrottet wrote in “The Naked Olympics” (Random House, 2004).

Perrottet added, “Ironically, considering its repellent origins, the torch race has come to symbolize international brotherhood today, and remains a centerpiece of our own pomp-filled Olympic opening ceremonies.”

This week in Time:

[The Chinese internal security guarding the torch’s] presence has only exacerbated the protests that surround the relay, says Steve Tsang, a China specialist at Oxford University. “It is very much self-inflicted damage to China’s position in the international community,” he says. “In any event you’d have protests … but the scale became much bigger when interest groups knew beforehand that they would be guaranteed prime-time television coverage. What was the Chinese government thinking? How could it send the People’s Armed Police to beat up protesters, even push around foreign celebrities holding the torch, and not attract even more attention?”

More on the history of the torch at Wikipedia.

From the NY Times:

What was supposed to be a majestic procession for the Olympic torch through the French capital turned into chaos Monday as thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed to protest the passage of the flame. The torch went out several times, and police officers had to put it onto a bus to try to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail. In the end, organizers canceled the final leg of the procession.

And from Time:

“The Chinese have made sure that for a few hours, Paris will look like Tiananmen Square,” noted Robert Menard, head of the Reporters Without Frontiers group, before the Paris protests he helped organize. “I think it’s shameful.”

And back to the Times:

A Chinese spokesman, Qu Yingpu, said Chinese officials were grateful to the police “for their efforts to keep order.” He added: “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

I think the belief that a public space is an inappropriate platform for public expression is precisely the issue so many people are taking with China right now. I can’t think of a more appropriate time to protest than during China’s crackdown on Tibet, leading up to the first Olympics held in a non-democratic society.

Street art, Munich by jacobssalon at Flickr