The Olympic rings and the torch relay, did not originate in ancient Greece, but instead were immortalized in Nazi Germany. The Olympic custom of carrying a flaming torch from Athens to the site of the Games was started by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The torch relay that culminates in the ceremonial lighting of the flame at Olympic stadium was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, who tried to turn the 1936 Berlin Games into a celebration of the Third Reich. "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," author Tony Perrottet writes in his book "The Naked Olympics".
In fact, this ceremony never occurred at the ancient Olympic Games.No torch lighting, relay races, or other pyrotechnic shows ever made their appearance at the ancient Olympic Games.A sacred flame did burn 24 hours a day at Olympia and relay racers passed a torch to light a sacrificial cauldron at some other ancient festivals but the ancient Greeks opened their Olympics by word of mouth, sending heralds,not torchbearers running through the streets.
The modern tradition of spiriting the Olympic torch to the main stadium didn't become a fixture of the Games until 1936, when a 12-day run opened the Games in Berlin.
On July 20, 1936, two weeks before the start of the Berlin Olympic Games, a Greek “high priestess” and fourteen girls wearing classical robes gathered in the ancient Stadium of Olympia, and used parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on a wand until it burst into flame.
The so-called Olympic flame was then carried by 3,075 relay runners from Greece, passed from magnesium torch to torch (each one bearing the logo of the German arms manufacturer Krupp), until it finally lit a colossal brazier in the Berlin stadium before the Führer’s approving gaze.
The Olympic rings, since they made their debut in 1920 at Antwerp, Belgium, also have their own Nazi connection.It was Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine that popularized the five rings as the symbol of the Olympic Games.
The Olympic rings were designed in 1913 by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the IOC and father of the modern Olympic movement, for a 1914 World Olympic Congress in Paris.The Olympic rings were supposed to symbolize the first five Olympics, but the Congress disbanded when Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo,Bosnia, triggering World War I.
Yet the Olympic rings are now said to represent the "five continents", with North and South America as a single land mass?!
Nazi filmmaker,Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl ,who also chronicled Hitler's rise to power, had the rings carved into a stone altar at the ancient Greek city of Delphi, spawning the myth that they were a symbol dating more than two millennia.
With Hitler's influence, the rings became part of the Nazi pageantry at Berlin and they've come to symbolize the Olympics ever since.
Outside of the Olympics,Hitler's obsession with ancient Greece continued.
"Hitler had nutty ideas that soup from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany was the direct descendent of a certain Spartan broth.And the (Nazi) Germans loved to have events in classical-style plazas. The Konigsplaza in Munich was apparently the spot for book burning because of the Greek style of the setting ",Perrottet said.
The Nazi fabrications live on in Greece today.Tony Perrottet said some archaeologists that he interviewed there said the hardest thing about their work was not the blazing summer heat, but the number of tourists who questioned them every day about where the ancient torch lighting ceremony was held.
The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years as part of a five-day religious festival.They lasted for more than 1100 years, from 776 B.C until AD 393 when they were outlawed by Theodosius I, the Christian emperor of Rome, on the grounds that they were pagan. The Olympic Games were not held again until 1896.
The original Olympic Games are shrouded in myth. Historians believe that in fact, the only real link between old and new is that the modern games are bedevilled by similar problems to those of antiquity. They have in common only "the name, a four-year cycle and a few events", according to the historian Professor Donald Kyle, from the University of Texas at Arlington.
The ancient Olympic Games briefly included mule-cart racing but there was no decathlon, no marathon, no ball sports, no watersports, no weightlifting, no team sports or oval track, and no triple jump or high jump. The javelin was thrown using a thong wrapped around its shaft, while competitors in the long jump, who may have been allowed a short run-up, held and swung weights to increase their jumps. Runners started from a standing position, and those who false-started were whipped.
"Probably the biggest differences have to do with the fact that in antiquity the Olympic Games were a component of a major religious festival in honour of Zeus," Professor David Gilman Romano from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology said.
Initially only Greek men were allowed to compete, and married women were barred even from attending. Those caught sneaking into the stadium were taken to Typaeum, "a precipitous mountain with lofty cliffs" according to Pausanias, a 2nd-century traveller, and thrown off it.
There was no room for sponsorship logos, that curse of the modern era. Athletes competed naked and after the mother of the athlete Pisirodos was caught disguising herself as his coach to enter the Games, trainers were also made to shed their clothes.
The moral values of the modern Olympic Games also bear little resemblance to those of the old. Coming first was all that mattered to the ancients and there were no prizes for second or third.
