The Dark History of the Olympic Torch Relay

The lighting of the Olympic cauldron on the River Seine on July 26 will mark the beginning of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and the end of a two-and-a-half-month torch relay designed to ignite enthusiasm across France for the Games.

First lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece, on April 16 as an homage to the ancient version of the Games, the torch arrived in Marseilles, France, three weeks later via a three-masted ship. By the time its journey ends about 10,000 torchbearers—including Ukrainian gymnast Mariia Vysochanska, former NBA star Tony Parker, and Michelin-starred chef Alexandre Mazzia— will have carried it to 64 French territories, visiting historic sites like the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy and the Palace of Versailles.

However, this bright point in the countdown to the Olympics has a dark origin story. It dates back to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, at a time when dictator Adolf Hitler was trying to boost the image of the Nazi Party. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, flames were lit to mark the beginning of the Games and extinguished to signal the end of the Games. But the first torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. , That year the torch was transported to seven countries over 12 days. When it arrived at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, Hitler himself declared that the Games had officially begun, according to the book Total Olympics by Jeremy Fuchs.

Hitler was a devout reader of Greek mythology and drawn to the torch as a symbol of ancient Greece. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis compared themselves to the ancient Greeks, and a Nazi myth argued that “a superior German civilization was the rightful heir of an ‘Aryan’ culture of classical antiquity.” Hitler wanted to use the torch as a propaganda symbol, akin to the torchlit parades and rallies that the party regularly hosted to draw youth and adults to the Nazi movement.

At this point, the torch relay has been completely disassociated from its Nazi past, but it has occasionally sparked controversy over the years. For example, during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the torch relay became a target of anti-China and pro-Tibet protests. Taiwan also didn’t want to be included in the relay because it wanted to assert its self-governance, the Associated Press reports.
For the most part, however, the torch relay today is seen as a way to celebrate each host country’s claims to fame as the flame is transported to different landmarks. As Tony Perrottet writes in his 2004 book The Naked Olympics, the torch is seen as a “symbol of international brotherhood.”