EGN NEWS DESK
The lighting of the Olympic cauldron on the River Seine on July 26 will mark the start of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics and the top of a two-and-a-half-month torch relay designed to ignite enthusiasm throughout France for the video games.
First lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece, on April 16 as an homage to the traditional model of the Games, the torch arrived in Marseilles, France, three weeks later by way of a three-masted ship. By the time its journey ends about 10,000 torchbearers—together with Ukrainian gymnast Mariia Vysochanska, former NBA star Tony Parker, and Michelin-starred chef Alexandre Mazzia— may have carried it to 64 French territories, visiting historic websites just like the D-Day touchdown seashores in Normandy and the Palace of Versailles.
However, this brilliant level within the countdown to the Olympics has a darkish origin story. It dates again to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, at a time when dictator Adolf Hitler was attempting to spice up the picture of the Nazi Party. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, flames have been lit to mark the start of the Games and extinguished to sign the top of the Games. But the primary torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. , That 12 months the torch was transported to seven nations over 12 days. When it arrived on the Olympiastadion in Berlin, Hitler himself declared that the Games had formally begun, in response to the e book Total Olympics by Jeremy Fuchs.
Hitler was a religious reader of Greek mythology and drawn to the torch as a logo of historic Greece. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis in contrast themselves to the traditional Greeks, and a Nazi fantasy argued that “a superior German civilization was the rightful inheritor of an ‘Aryan’ tradition of classical antiquity.” Hitler needed to make use of the torch as a propaganda image, akin to the torchlit parades and rallies that the party repeatedly hosted to attract youth and adults to the Nazi motion.
At this level, the torch relay has been fully disassociated from its Nazi previous, but it surely has sometimes sparked controversy through the years. For instance, in the course of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the torch relay turned a goal of anti-China and pro-Tibet protests. Taiwan additionally didn’t wish to be included within the relay as a result of it needed to say its self-governance, the Associated Press reviews.
For essentially the most half, nonetheless, the torch relay right this moment is seen as a strategy to have a good time every host nation’s claims to fame because the flame is transported to completely different landmarks. As Tony Perrottet writes in his 2004 e book The Naked Olympics, the torch is seen as a “image of worldwide brotherhood.”
