Le Flambeau Olympique: Le Grand Symbole Olympique

"This is a great book. It’s such a lavish thing. It’s 460 pages on beautiful paper with wonderful illustrations, a lot of them from his own personal collection. There are cartoons in there as well as the actual story of each torch run, with some unusual pictures. He includes quite a lot of himself carrying the torch, because in 1968 he accompanied it for a lot of the way because they did a special thing for the Mexico Olympics with Spain, celebrating the connections between the old world and the new world. They built it round this ‘voyage to the new world’ theme, which was rather romantic, and he took part as one of the commissioners to make sure that the flame got to where it was meant to be. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When I wrote my much more modest book about the Olympic torch, I sent him a copy and this beautiful lavish album came back. It’s full of photographs. It shows you things that have happened on the relay that you wouldn’t necessarily know about. And its great beauty is that, because it covers each relay separately, you can compare and contrast how the relay was conducted each time. Each country tries to stamp its identity on it and, with the colour illustrations and the text, it really captures that. In 1968 it went across the Atlantic by boat and then through Central America, including the Mayan temples in Teotihuacan. At the 1956 Melbourne games, it made a journey down Australia’s eastern coast. At Sydney 2000, they developed a special torch that would allow a diver to go out down to the coral reefs of the Great Barrier Reef under water. They started the relay at Uluru (Ayers Rock). The Greeks had the torch carried by people wearing the fustanella— the skirt you see their soldiers wearing—in ceremonial roles. The Australians made a point of choosing their greatest female champion, Cathy Freeman, in the stadium itself to light the flame. The Spanish had an archer who lit the flame by firing an arrow and that remains a very memorable image. Muhammad Ali was American, so Atlanta could call upon ‘the greatest’ to light the cauldron at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. Each place tries to look at their traditions and symbolic moments from their country’s history and invest the flame with those. It’s those individual stories that the book tells. “Great Britain was at the forefront of all the activities that encouraged and brought about international sport” Until 1984 it was mainly just athletes who carried the flame, but that all changed. People can now be nominated to carry the flame because they are worthy citizens, those who have done something for their communities, ‘civic champions’. Also, the sponsors now have a better opportunity to nominate people. I was nominated because I’d helped the British Olympic Association with some of their history and they asked me if I would like to carry the torch. I carried it twice. I was allowed to carry it in Greece in 1996, as part of the International Olympic Academy in the Taygetus Mountains above Sparta. I also carried it in Brentford, alongside the River Thames, in 2012. For me, that was very appropriate because I used to work for a TV programme called Transworld Sport and our headquarters were just a stone’s throw away. That was my first job in television."