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Before we get serious about the sacred Olympic Flame, here is a little anecdote that I read somewhere recently.
It happened in Sydney just before the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. The scene was strikingly familiar as the 'Olympic torch' changed hands during the tour of the city. Eventually a student masquerading as an Olympic runner came up to the Mayor and handed him the 'torch' before disappearing in the crowd.
The 'Olympic torch' was nothing but burning underpants pinned to the top of a table leg!
It all happened so quickly and unobtrusively that this incident is rarely remembered or recalled. But the message was loud and clear even though it took place more than half a century ago when the torch ritual itself was just two decades old.
The intention was to make a mockery of a ceremony invented by Hitler to give the Nazis a coming-out-party as part of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The Olympic Flame, however, has continued since then and reached all six inhabited continents even though it has lost much of its sanctity. I'm afraid it is now close to losing its legitimacy as well.
In the last week alone, the flame has fallen from grace like never before. It has been manhandled, grounded and even doused. Be it for anti-Chinese reasons or a pro-Tibet cause depends on one's viewpoint. But what has emerged clearly is that this ritual has now become moribund.
And it can only get worse as ideological contradictions gets starker and the confusion becomes even more confounding.
My take on this is to scrap the whole thing before the wrangle turns into a full-fledged war.
After all, the Olympic torch is not part of the original Olympic movement. It was not part of the ancient Olympics and even the modern Games did well without it till 1936 when the Nazis came up with the idea of a relay race from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the stadium in Berlin to propagate the alleged Aryan supremacy along its 3,442-km route.
Now it seems the communist Chinese want to use it as a tool in their ambitious and ostentatious move to embrace the free world. This has triggered a major crisis that may turn into carnage in the near future.
Just imagine a US city getting to host the Olympic Games within the next decade. If the Olympic Flame ritual survives till then, it may need war planes and nuclear power to safeguard it from protestors.
I can't think of a tiny bit of land on this planet, including the length and breadth of the US, which will allow the Flame to pass without an incident. With a worse case scenario like this, who wants the Flame which can turn itself from being a symbol of peace to just the opposite?
This may not stop the protesters from making the Olympic Games itself a target for projecting political and social grievances. But then any protest is not detrimental to human existence. It is rather an essential tool, a normal function as long as it does not transgress accepted norms.
The history of modern Games is dotted with different kinds of invasions, controversies and protests, and yet it has survived for more than a century.
In 1936 it was Nazi propaganda, in 1956 the Israeli invasion of Egyptian land kept Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon out of the Games and in 1968 black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists to protest racial ill treatment.
The 1972 Munich Games witnessed its darkest hour and needs no retelling here. Then we move on to the 1980 Moscow Games when the US blackmailed 61 nations into boycotting it to protest against USSR's invasion of Afghanistan.
Four years later, it was tit-for-tat and since then the turmoil and turbulence have ebbed and flowed but not ceased. Ironically, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq between the 2000 Sydney and the 2004 Athens Games. Yet there has not been a murmur of protest.
Protests, however, are likely to continue along the Olympic torch's route to Beijing, despite its peaceful landing in Muscat, Oman, earlier this week. Protests were to be expected if the planned parading of the torch went ahead in Tibet's capital, Lhasa.
I agree politics should be kept away from sports, though the reverse may not be possible. I also subscribe to the school of thought that upholds the pristine virtues of sports. But sports and politics will remain like magnets to each other. This is the difficult part.
And rituals like the Olympic torch relay can only add fuel to the fire (pun intended, of course). Douse it, now.
