Origin of The Olympic Flame

I hope the start of your New Year has a positive one, promising to be a great year.  

While working on my project at hand, my fourth book in the Silver Sage Creek Novels, I’ve been doing research, which I enjoy and have to make myself STOP and get back to writing. Anyway, I ran across an interesting article that you might like to hear about – The Olympic Flame.

Come February 8, 2018 most eyes will be trained on their televisions, iphones, ipads, laptops, computers, Androids, and all the other technologies out there, at the Opening Ceremony of The Winter Olympic Games. We’ll be watching the parade embracing the world’s best athletes competing to achieve top-quality performances in all the winter games.

 What’s happening to the Olympic Flame at this moment? Did you know there are and have been 7,500 torchbearers taking part in the Olympic Torch Relay? Starting in November, 2017, following the lighting of the Olympic flame in Olympia, Greece, the torch started its long journey, byway of 17 cities and provinces throughout the Republic of Korea giving the host country along the route a chance to share and feel the excitement of the Olympic Torch Relay. 

Not until February 9, 2018 will the final torchbearer of the lighting of the Olympic cauldron be revealed, the day of the Opening Ceremony in PyeongChang.  

Here are a few, and I mean a few, facts about the origin of The Olympic Flame:

The Flame has its origins from the Ancient Greek Olympics. A fire altar burned in an Olympia sanctuary that was dedicated to Hera, the Olympian queen of the gods, the goddess of women and marriage. Many other fires were lit in Zeus’ and Hera’s temples throughout Greece, honoring the gods during Olympic Games.

Skipping ahead to 1928, during the Amsterdam Summer Olympics, the flame was lit at what used to be the same location of Hera’s temple, which at this time there was no torch relay. The recent tradition of bringing the flame to the host city from Greece started during the 1936 Berlin Games.

When Hitler and his Nazi Party, along with its aggressive foreign policy, took over Germany in 1933, Hitler was against hosting the Games. Celebrating any type of multicultural event wasn’t exactly his thing, considering he thought the inventors of the Games were Jews and Freemasons. Many thought he would cancel hosting the Games in Berlin, but Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels convinced him the event was an opportunity to show the world the superiority of their athletes.

The Secretary General of the Organization Committee of Berlin Olympic Games and Berlin’s sports administrator, Carl Diem, thought a torch relay would be a great means as a propaganda machine. Both Hitler and Goebbels thought it fitting to relay a torch from Greece to Berlin to show connections between Ancient Greece and the modern German Reich. Hitler believed that the Ancient Greeks were Aryan harbingers to the modern German Aryan people (Hitler and Aryan Myth could actually be another post). But moving on about the flame…

Did you know the torch has accidentally or purposely gone out during the relay? Now the torch has two different flames in it. There’s a visible one and a pilot light inside, including several miner’s safety lamps with the original flame lit in Greece. It isn’t uncommon for the flame to go out from rainstorms, strong winds, protests, pranks, and accidental extinguishing. Moving on, did you know there have been many, many torches used throughout the decades? Here are only a few...

There is so much more history about the Olympic Flame and if you’re interested, go to http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/origin-of-the-olympic-flame-tradition-and-the-nazi-origin-of-the-olympic-torch-relay/  I’m sure there are many more sites to read about the origin of the flame and including the origin of the Olympic Games.

Happy Researching,

Judy