The colourful history of the Olympic opening ceremony

By Catherine Baker, University of Hull

If you’re planning to tune in to the Paris Olympics, you probably aren’t just looking forward to the feats of sporting excellence – you’ll be hoping to catch the cultural spectacle of the opening ceremony, too. These flashy events, which kick off each games, aim to tell fresh stories about the host city and country, and set new creative standards for live mega-events.

The ceremonies combine ritual elements from the Olympic Charter (the rules and principles of the International Olympic Committee) such as the athletes’ parade and the raising of the Olympic flag, and cultural performances designed by national organisers. They showcase international Olympic ideals and also communicate things about the host country’s identity and culture.

However, it took decades for Olympic opening ceremonies to reach this scale. At the first modern Olympics in 1896, in Athens, athletes simply entered the stadium to hear speeches and a specially composed hymn – though more than 50,000 spectators still attended.

The 1908 London Olympics, the first to have a purpose-built stadium, were also the first to feature athletes parading in national team uniforms. With almost 700 athletes on the Great Britain and Ireland team, the games affirmed a narrative of Britain as the spiritual home of amateur sport, which ran through into colonial ideas of the British empire’s “civilising mission”.

Opening ceremonies continued in their traditional format after the first world war. At the Paris 1924 Games, the first to be extensively filmed, national teams marched, dignitaries gave speeches and carrier pigeons were released into the air.

A troubling reality for idealistic myths about Olympic history is that the first opening ceremony on a scale like today’s was the 1936 Berlin Games – “Hitler’s Olympics”. Berlin’s opening ceremony applied the stagecraft propaganda of the Nuremberg rallies to a ceremony that aimed to normalise Nazi Germany as a world power, and even employed the same filmmaker who documented the rallies, Leni Riefenstahl.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/the-colourful-history-of-the-olympic-opening-ceremony-235380