Fiona Veitch Smith

As I write this, the Olympic Flame has just been lit opening the 29th Modern Olympic Games. The first Olympic flame was lit at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928 and the Torch Relay was added to the ceremony in Berlin, 1936, at ‘Hitler’s Olympics’. It was not in the original vision of the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, in 1896, but he welcomed it as a powerful religious and artistic symbol that could be used to educate people in the ideals of the Olympic movement.

Image courtesy of Rick Sforza

These ideals, according to the Olympic Charter, are to

…contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

Nothing wrong with that, you would agree, but as the pro-Tibet demonstrators would have us remember, there is a huge gap between that ideal and the practise of the host nation in its occupied territory.
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