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From the Spartakiades to the Arirangs

Games, festivals, mass celebrations have been used and misused throughout history by both democratic and despotic governments. The socialist Proletariat Games and the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin are the forerunners of today’s massive, lavish, Olympic and like ceremonies. Mounted by the Soviet-bloc, Nazi and Mao Zedong regimes, the socialist aura to those games is still very much alive in one of the last totalitarian regimes left in the world, in North Korea’s Arirang Games.

Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1918, and then spread their socialist ideology to other countries, the use of mass gymnastic displays to further socialist ideals was not far behind.

On 23 July 1921, the Bolsheviks organized the “International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations” (later known in short as “RSI” or Red Sport International) in Moscow to promote communist-based sports and gymnastics. RSI was created to steer worker sports organizations around the world away from the rival Lucerne-based Sport International, and as the emerging communist world’s answer to the aristocracy/royalty-dominated, Lausanne-based International Olympic Committee.

Start of Communist kitsch. In October 1922, Czechoslovakia’s communist sports federation became the first foreign chapter to join the new organization, followed shortly by the similar federations of France (1923) and Norway (1924). However, it was not until the RSI’s Fifth World Congress in the fall of 1924 that RSI was officially recognized by the Comintern. By that time, the Sportintern had become primarily an instrument of the Young Communist International, the youth wing of Comintern. Other chapters in North, South America and Europe quickly followed suit. And in August 1928, the RSI held its first Spartakiade in Moscow. By the end of the 1920s, even with branches in three continents, the RSI was disbanded by the Comintern in April 1937, the eve of World War 2. However, for some reason, the Czech Republic chapter remained very active in putting on the Spartakiades after the war, and kept meticulous records of those events from its communist era.

Gymnasts as far as the eye could see-- Velky Strahovsky Stadium, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1955.

Some positively mind-numbing communist-era Czech Spartakiade statistics (note: the massive participating gymnastic numbers are on a national basis rather than just for the Prague-based events):

•The Velky Strahovsky Stadium in Prague, of course, fulfilled all the bombastic superlatives that the former socialist regimes so loved to spout. The playing field, surrounded by seating on all sides, is 63,500 sqm (nearly 6.5 hectares or eight football pitches in size). The stadium has seen as many as 230,000 spectators recorded at the 1967 Spartakiade. Today, it is the largest stadium in the world today no longer in use for sports purposes. (Only the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is larger, with a seating capacity of more than 250,000—but that is for motorized sport.)

•In 1955, over half a million gymnasts took part in the first national Spartakiade (photo above) held on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army—so members of the all-high Moscow Politburo were in attendance.

•In 1960, more than two million spectators viewed two four-programme cycles of Spartakiade performances at Prague’s Strahov stadium.

•In 1965, 1,365,514 gymnasts performed in 410 district and county Spartakiades across Czechoslovakia.

•Ten years later, the summer 1975 Spartakiades nationwide saw that number double to a recorded participation of 2,714,666 gymnasts all across the country.

•In 1990, more than 800,000 trainees participated in learning seventeen different displays.

Old Habits Die Hard. After Czechoslovakia split into two nations in 1993 and as late as 2000, the original Czech half, post-communist era, was still staging these mass spectacles now called Sokol Slets.

But never was this monolithic, totally controlled, one-mindset ambiance in an Olympic Games more apparent--amazingly and sadly, all at the same time--than in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

1936. The Nazis continued the Comintern tradition of imbuing a major international sporting event with their own political agenda and visual identity—and none more blatantly so than at the 1938 Games in Berlin. It was a strange confluence of events in the early 1930s that resulted in the Games of the XIth Olympiad being hijacked by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. In 1930, the XIth Olympiad (so a Winter and Summer Games in the same year) were awarded to Germany. The winter was set for Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer for Berlin. At the time, Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were just on the verge of assuming power in Germany.

Before they formally assumed power in February 1933, the Nazis, according to Olympic historian Bill Henry, dismissed the Olympics as “… (another) infamous festival dominated by Jews.” However, once Hitler and his thugs realized that they could use the international event to promote their cause of Aryan superiority, the Olympics after all being a mostly physical contest, they tried by every means possible to gain control of the Games. They set out to turn them into a Nazi coming-out party. And to some degree they succeeded, but not before a valiant fight was put up by both the IOC and the local German Organizing Committee (OC). The Berlin 1936 Organizing Committee was headed by Drs. Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, old-line German sports leaders who were not in any way affiliated with the Nazis; although it didn’t help matters any that Dr. Lewald was part Jewish.

In the years leading up to the Games, the Nazis attempted to replace Dr. Lewald with their own henchman, a Von Tschammer und Osten, as president of the OC. However, the IOC blocked this move with a counter-ultimatum that if the Nazis interfered in the OC leadership, the Games would be cancelled. As Olympic historian Bill Henry noted again: “To the ever-lasting credit of IOC president (1925-1942) Count Baillet-Latour and his fellow members of the International Olympic Committee, Dr. Lewald was retained…” Henry also recognized this situation as “…probably the only instance in which a Nazi ultimatum was flatly rejected and Hitler was forced to back down…” The Nazis’ candidate, und Osten, was then charged with the task of building the host German team.

‘Olympia’ the documentary. Still, as so beautifully caught in Leni Riefenstahl’s award-winning documentary of those Games, Olympia, the Nazis managed to put on a streamlined, visually impressive Games that belied the darkness that was to come. Under the guise of a peaceful, efficient, even “happy” utopia, Riefenstahl captured a certain poetic beauty to those 14 days of competition even while cloaked in the omnipresent Nazi trappings.

First Torch Relay. When the summer of 1936 arrived, the Nazis ratcheted up the cauldron-lighting drama to perfection by adding a Torch Relay. It was the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem. With the IOC’s blessing, elaborate arrangements were made with the Hellenic (and six other) Olympic associations for a flame-lighting ceremony at Olympia, Greece (which German archeologists had discovered decades before). The flame was then to be run through six countries before reaching Berlin. On 1 August 1936, a most Aryan-looking athlete named Fritz Schligen entered Berlin Olympic Stadium, torch in hand, to become the first person in history to light the cauldron of a modern era Olympics.

First Screenings in the U.S. Riefenstahl came to the U.S. in 1938 and screened the film in the hope of finding an American distributor. Faced with fierce protests from many American organizations, in particular the 'Anti-Nazi League,' Riefenstahl did not succeed. The first two screenings in the U.S. were private affairs. The first, in November 1938, was held in Chicago under the auspices of Avery Brundage, then-president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an ardent Nazi-sympathizer. The second showing took place at the California Club in L.A. with screen Tarzans (and ex-Olympians) Johnny Weissmuller and Glenn Morris in attendance. Morris happened to be Riefenstahl ex-lover. For that screening, Riefenstahl used a copy with almost all the scenes featuring Hitler edited out. Then there was supposedly a public screening in New York in 1940. The U.S. entered the war in December 1941.

There is one scene in the documentary of a very beautiful woman, in all her naked glory, indulging in some calisthenics. This was supposed to be Riefenstahl herself. Odd that she edited scenes of Hitler for the Los Angeles showing but not this one of herself. In later years, she fudged her age in order to be able to take some scuba diving lessons.

Because the subject matter and atmosphere was heavily masculine and the documentary was made by a woman, Olympia has sometimes been hailed as one of the ten best films of all time. However, the film doesn’t really hold up well. Riefenstahl’s techniques and camera angles may have been innovative for its time, but with uninspired editing, it looks woefully out-of-date today. With heavy-handed narration, it does not appear too different from most newsreels of its day. Further, compared to later documentaries of postwar Olympics, especially the Bud Greenspan productions which focused on a handful of select stories, Olympia is too comprehensive--encompassing everything, to the point of being tedious and boring.

Tie a Yella Ribbon ‘round the Old Oak Tree… Aside from the Torch Relay, the award of laurel crowns to athletic winners, one of the other original touches the Nazis added was the awarding of oak tree saplings to the 1936 gold medalists. These came from a giant, mother oak tree in Berlin and the one year-old saplings were given out as symbolic peace-and-goodwill keepsakes. A total of 113 saplings were known to have been awarded. The American team went home with 24 saplings, four of them to Jesse Owens alone.

The fate of these unique oak tree prizes was researched by Jim Constandt. In tracking down some 97 living 1936 gold medalists around the world, Constandt found that some athletes had either thrown away their plants or just hid them because of their Hitler association. Those that got planted, became sick and/or simply died. The U.S. men’s basketball team drew lots as to who would get its one sapling. It got planted but some seventy years later, no one knew where. Constandt had better luck in finding the Jesse Owens oaks; or the two that survive today. One is at Rhodes High School in Cleveland, Ohio where he trained; the other is at Ohio State University. A third had been planted at his mother’s house also in Cleveland, but that apparently fell victim to a demolition of the house in the 1960s. There was no trace of the fourth Owens oak. Two of the other Berlin oak trees that survive in the U.S. today, are on the USC campus in Los Angeles.

While the concept of handing out living-green awards is quite politically correct, it would prove impractical today. It would be all but impossible to now bring flora like these home because of stringent agricultural customs laws in most countries, most specifically the U.S. and Australia.

The outbreak of World War 2, both in Europe and Asia, put a halt to all official Olympic goings-on. However, while the IOC and the Swiss Olympic Committee marked the 50^th anniversary of the IOC’s founding with some small-scale celebrations in Lausanne, Switzerland in June 1944, the spirit of competition carried on during the war years in some of the unlikeliest settings.

The Lost POW Olympics. Simultaneously in that summer of 1944, two prisoner of war camps in Poland and Germany, the Woldenberg and Gross Born Oflag camps respectively, saw the celebration of mini-Olympics under the direst conditions imaginable. Both were officer camps which mostly housed Polish and other allied military prisoners. At the Woldenberg Oflag II-C POW camp (now Dobiegnieu, Poland), the Nazi captors allowed their prisoners to stage a mini-Olympics. These were called the “International Prisoner-of-War Olympic Games.” The prisoners were allowed to form as national teams and compete in a few sports. Similarly, postage stamps and some coinage were issued with the proper markings; and a makeshift Olympic flag was even used.

That flag, along with surviving postage stamps, are on view today at the Sports Museum in Warsaw. For some strange reason, perhaps because the Nazis saw their greatest glory in the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin, they allowed these P.O.W. diversions to take place. Above all, they were a testament of resistance and the Olympic spirit in the face of tyranny and one-time proponent of the Olympic Games.

Post World War 2. In the aftermath of World War 2, erstwhile allies had broken up into two even more antagonistic camps, seeking total control of the new postwar order. And nowhere was this truer than on the vast Asian mainland. The West (the U.S. really) was weary and weakened by the four-year global conflict; but still the communists would not let up. The Asian communists not only succeeded in pushing out the old

Kuomintang rulers of China to the small island of Formosa (now Taiwan) and gaining total control of the mainland, but were actively fomenting another conflict on the Korean peninsula. It was against this redrawn background that spectacular stadium shows of the socialist stripe flourished. They put on shows which someone on a sports forum very aptly and appropriately labeled ‘communist kitsch.’ Today, the mainland Chinese still hold their sports spectacle, the Chinese National Games, on a quadrennial basis.

Fast-forward to 1980. Forty-four years later, the capital city of one of the nations that brought down the Nazis, was itself now decked out in Olympic finery. Although its dance card was half-empty (or half-full, depending on how one looked at the shot of vodka), Moscow was now playing host to the XXIInd Olympiad. The post-war Olympic fathers had given the successor Soviet regime a chance at the Olympic Games. As the largest nation on earth, the Soviets put on a grand, extremely disciplined show. Although those Games were barely seen in the west (or in the U.S., thanks to the Carter administration-led boycott; I had seen an edited version of the opening ceremony at a commercial showing in New York City), the Soviets tried to overcompensate for the absence of its rival sports powers with the most massive Olympic opening ceremony up to that time. As befits a dictatorship, the most obvious quality of the Moscow ceremonies was the joyless discipline of its performers. The young Soviets performed like numb automatons.

The most impressive aspects of the Moscow ceremonies were its stunt card section and the lighting of the cauldron. Some 6,500 Soviet army cadets were pressed into service performing one of the most intricate stunt card shows of all time. The cadets practiced for six months, rehearsing not only some 30-40 unfolding scenes for Opening Ceremony but an equal number for the Closing as well. For the lighting of the cauldron, let’s just say that upper body strength was a premium requirement. A more detailed description of the Moscow 1980 cauldron-lighting awaits in Chapter 7, Lighting the Torch.

Still, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies offered gymnasts galore, folk dancers from every corner of the vast Soviet empire, and still more limber gymnasts than the eye could take in. In a way, the over-the-top, en masse character of today’s Olympic and similar ceremonies can be traced to totalitarian regimes’ shows such as Moscow’s 1980 show.

It is worth noting that the Carter administration’s unpopular boycott machinations might’ve cost NBC, the U.S. network that had won the rights to telecast the Moscow Games, dearly. But in fact, it did not. NBC had made industry headlines when it had bid and won the Moscow rights for $87 million, in the process breaking rival network ABC’s stranglehold over the Games and its cozy relationship with the Olympic poobahs in Lausanne. With its new logo, NBC hoped to launch a blitzkrieg attack in the summer of 1980 to gain supremacy in the ratings war with its Moscow coverage. However, they had also negotiated a very good contract with the IOC and bought an even more far-sighted insurance policy from Lloyd’s for $4.6 million which covered their $87 million investment in the event that the Games were cancelled or the U.S. failed to participate. With the U.S. and its allies bailing out early enough, NBC did not have to fulfill all its advance payments to the Moscow Organizing Committee, and whatever it had already paid was covered by the solid insurance policy. All in all, NBC lost only about $4.7 million on its first high-stakes flirtation with the Olympic world.

Flag Flap. The U.S.-led boycott created all sorts of flag protocol problems for these Games: fifteen nations (mostly west European, Australia and Puerto Rico) whose NOCs could not be dissuaded to boycott, participated in those Games under the neutral Olympic flag. Their governments refused to have their national flags officially flown here and the presence of so many white Olympic flags was a source of great embarrassment for the host Soviets.

(Paradoxically, just twelve years later, when the Soviet empire was dismantled in 1991, the ex-Soviet republics marched in both the Albertville and Barcelona 1992 Opening Ceremonies under the Olympic flag as the Unified Team, although the athletes individually carried little hand-held flags of their respective republics—a direct violation of earlier IOC ceremonial protocol rules.)

At the Closing, otherwise conventional Olympic protocol procedures were challenged because in what was supposed to have been the Handover segment, neither the flag of the next host country (the U.S.), nor the California flag were raised. Since the U.S. did not recognize those Games, it forbade its flag be flown and its anthem not be played. Instead, just to satisfy some part of Olympic protocol, it was the City of Los Angeles’ flag which was raised to the strains of California, Here I Come (the unofficial, public domain song of the state) at Closing, as the incoming host city.

Sarajevo 1984. Because the IOC likes to see a certain parallelism in its activities, it then gave the 1984 Winter Games to a slightly more benevolent socialist regime than the Soviets. The 1984 Games were to be played out in the Yugoslavian Muslim enclave of Sarajevo, the city best known as the assassination site of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand--which incident ignited World War One.

The Sarajevans put on an impressive, coldly efficient opening ceremony. There were magnificent swaths of color in the white snow at Opening. But it was also one of the last few unified, peaceful moments in post-Tito Yugoslavia. Seven years later, in 1991, the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic began, and like the world war (and the Holocaust) which came in the wake of Berlin, Yugoslavia was hurled into a series of civil conflicts and ethnic cleansings. These acts were mostly instigated by the dominant Serbian Republic. Sadly, Sarajevo served as a major killing ground for the prolonged, brutal occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbs. A lot of the ravaged venues in Sarajevo are nothing but shells of their former glorious days of 1984, a grim reminder of what the Olympics have tried to displace if they could.

Pyongyang Follies. We now turn to the last holdout of these totalitarian-regime, strictly disciplined, almost mindless performance of massed crowds: the North Korean Mass Games. If anything comes closest to the idea of pure ceremonies for the sake of spectacle–and no sport--it would be the Arirang Games of North Korea. There supposedly is nothing quite like it today. These are annual exercises of massed human displays for spectacle’s sake that precede hardly any sports at all. Oh, there are displays of taekwondo or some sort of martial arts, but whatever little sports there are, are merely a pretext to put on a mass show that only Las Vegas could envy. As many as 80,000 performers–yes, it is in the Guinness Book of World Records, and enough to fill a stadium–are recruited to perform unending formations morphing into other astounding formations. With the national stadium seating 150,000, the ratio of viewer to performer is exactly 2-to-1. Nearly 200 million man-hours are invested in rehearsing the show, starting outdoors in the wintertime--all these just for the glory of the Motherland and the ruling Kim family. And there isn’t even an opening or a closing Ceremony which outsiders normally recognize in the Olympic sense. The Arirang show is communist kitsch in its highest form.

Because North Korea is still such a closed, xenophobic society, and only a handful of foreign eyes have actually witnessed these unique shows, at very steep ducats, it is rare to get a full accounting of what the shows are really like. There is an excellent 2004 British documentary film called A State of Mind which chronicles the lives of two school girls as they prepare for the Mass Games. Barring availability of that, here is another journalistic account from an October 2005 Los Angeles Times Magazine article:

“Let the Games Bedazzle,” by Bruce Wallace, L.A. Times staff writer

The massive floor show blankets the field of Pyongyang's May Day Stadium (capacity 150,000) with columns of dancers and singers, gymnasts and acrobats, soldiers and schoolchildren. It is part of a uniquely North Korean art form known as mass games, and it is seen by the ruling leadership under Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong Il, as an effective way to keep the message of collective struggle—and struggle it is in this hungry police state of 23 million—in the public eye.

It is also arguably the most ambitious extravaganza ever to flicker across a choreographer's imagination. By comparison, a stadium rock show in the West looks about as sophisticated as a raised Bic lighter. For Arirang, think stadium opera lighted by lasers, with tumbling gymnasts and rivers of performers in colorful costumes, soldiers brandishing bayonets and acrobats dropping from the top of the stadium on bungee cords.

The finale from the 2005 Arirang show. That whole backdrop is one big stunt card section made up of schoolchildren, mostly ages 10-14.

Perhaps the most stunning element is the atmospheric backdrop provided by between 15,000 and 20,000 schoolchildren positioned in the seats along one grandstand, facing the audience. They all hold chest-sized booklets of colored cards, which they flip to different pages on cue to create different mosaics. The kids are in effect the light bulbs in a human Jumbotron, and they produce shimmering landscapes of mountains and rivers, raging battlefields, and Korean faces that express emotions from ferocity to joy…Critics say Arirang's wow factor in choreography is achieved on the back of ruthless training--several months of 10-hour-a-day practice drills that turn children as young as 4 or 5 into performing robots.

“They conduct it every year as a method to reinforce and remind people of the ideology,” says Kwak Tae Jung, a human rights activist based in Seoul who has interviewed 10 North Korean defectors who participated in previous mass games. The defectors describe practicing for hours without food or bathroom breaks. They recall being assigned to classes called “platoons” and say the children of Pyongyang's elite families were exempt from being conscripted into singing and dancing for the regime.

“People are not paid;” says Kwak, though “once every four or five years, the government would give TV sets or wristwatches as gifts to those who participated. They've been doing it for decades,” he says. “They consider it natural.”

More same old, same old. At the end of the 2011 Arirang Games, there were rumors that those extravaganzas would finally be retired—but only to be replaced in 2012 by what else? Something even grander, more bombastic and the show to end all communist kitsch shows—a new edition devoted to the beloved Supreme godhead of North Korea, Kim il-Sung. But with the sudden passing of son Kim Jong-Il in December 2011, that might throw the new plans into chaos. However, it seems that the North Koreans, deprived and starved as they were, are really secret grand showmen at heart.

Busting Certain Olympic Ceremonial Myths

Certain ceremonial Olympic traditions and fixtures that have appeared sacrosanct through the years are NOT at all such. Various behind-the-scene stories have appeared as of late to place these ‘revered’ Olympic institutions in proper historical context.

1. The Purloined “Antwerp” Flag. For a regular watcher of Olympic ceremonies, one will be familiar with what is referred to as the “Antwerp” flag–the first flag that supposedly featured the five Olympic rings and which is handed over from the mayor of the finishing host city at Closing to the next city mayor. In 1914, the IOC formally adopted the five-rings as its official emblem. The interlocking five rings were actually designed by IOC founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin himself, not the ancient Greeks (see story #3 following). The new flag made its official world debut at the opening ceremony of Antwerp 1920. However, come the closing ceremony when it was time for the handover to Paris 1924, the new flag was nowhere to be found. The original had simply vanished and there wasn’t enough time to create a replacement.

In 1997, at a banquet of the USOC, the mystery was solved seventy-seven years later. A reporter was interviewing Hal Haig Prieste, a platform diver and bronze medalist on the 1920 U.S. team. The reporter mentioned that the original flag from those Games was still missing. Without batting an eyelash, Prieste said: "I can help you with that. It's in my suitcase." He explained that before the 1920 Games drew to a close, he had filched the flag in question from its flagpole at the urging of his teammate, swimmer Duke Kahanamuka of Hawaii, as a prank. Since then, he had totally forgotten about the flag, lying undisturbed in his suitcase all that time. Come Sydney 2000, the historic artifact was returned to the IOC. Prieste, then 103 years old, traveled to Sydney and turned the flag over to the IOC in a special ceremony. The original flag is now on display at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, inscribed with a plaque thanking Prieste for “donating” the pristine banner.

So no handover took place at the close of the 1920 Games. Instead, four years later, a new 5-ring flag appeared again in Paris and that has been mistakenly referred to as the ‘Antwerp’ flag all these years. Also, the 1924 flag was passed on from Paris to the next games, St. Moritz 1928, then to Amsterdam 1928, to Lake Placid 1932, etc.; so summer-winter, etc., and so on. It was not until 1952 when Oslo created a new “hand-over” flag which was to be used only for the winter games’ handovers. The 1924 Paris flag did not reappear again until Melbourne 1956, but still known as the “Antwerp” flag and became a Summer Games-only flag.

In 1988, Seoul presented a new hand-over flag and the fake “Antwerp”/real “Paris” flag was retired. Barcelona was the first recipient of the new “Seoul” flag. And thanks to Hal Prieste for mucking up another piece of Olympic history.

And then at St. Moritz 1948, two Olympic flags flying at Olympic Stadium—neither of which was the ‘Paris’ flag which would be handed over to the mayor of London 1948--were likewise stolen before closing. A third flag had to be hurriedly hoisted and then walked out at Closing.

2. The Zamperini Caper. A more celebrated flag theft case—although not ceremonially important--was that of Louis Zamperini of Torrance, California. Perhaps he was bolder or more foolish, but when Zamperini, a U.S. runner, was in Berlin for the 1936 Games, off-track, he set his eyes on a Nazi flag which was flying at the Reichstag building. He did not get very far with the prank. He was quickly captured by the Gestapo but he talked his way out if it. After he ran the 5,000m final (he finished eighth), Adolf Hitler asked to meet the prankster personally. So even though he did not win a medal, Zamperini did Jesse Owens one better: he got to shake Hitler’s hand, live to brag about it--and got to keep his Nazi flag as a souvenir. After the war, Zamperini become a motivational speaker, ran in the LA 1984 and Nagano 1998 torch relays, and had his life story told in the 2010 best seller, Unbroken.

3. The Deceptive “Diem” Stone at Delphi. There sits in ancient Delphi, Greece today a “historic” stone supposedly linking Delphi to the Olympic Games. This, of course, is pure nonsense.

Ancient Delphi had its own set of sports and artistic competition, the Pythian Games, dedicated to Apollo. However, historic accuracy was farthest from the intentions of the Nazi Riefenstahl film crew when they filmed in Delphi in 1936. In another bit of historic deception, Riefenstahl set the start of the first Olympic Torch Relay in Delphi rather than in Olympia. In an attempt to mingle their National Socialist ideals with the classical ones of ancient Greece, and to provide graphic evidence that the five-ringed symbol of the modern era Olympics could indeed be “traced” back to ancient Greece, the Nazi film crew created a new film prop. They found an ancient block of stone on the premises, carved out the five rings on two sides and made sure it looked properly ‘ancient.’ This bit of ‘artistic’ deception stayed in the film’s final cut and on site. Today, the ‘Diem’ stone sits just outside the turnstile area of Delphi, bearing that ravages of some 60 years.

The Riefensthal-faux stone episode has often been called an act of cultural desecration of the ancient site. However, it should be viewed in its proper context. The whole oracular draw of Delphi to the ancients was in itself a whole gypsy, palm-reading act anyway. The “oracle” was supposedly inhaling sulphuric fumes from a crevice in the earth—so she was ‘high’—and the ‘priests’ in the next room interpreted her ravings in totally ambiguous ways that made the pronouncements appear inscrutable and ‘divine.’ The low and the mighty traveled far and wide just to come to this very steep place to get their fortunes told. So the Nazi film prop does not seem anymore out of place in Delphi than unofficial scribblings at the site. It is merely another addition to all the other graffiti inflicted on the ruins by others through the centuries. If anything, it was the calling card of Riefenstahl and crew for “Olympia”: Berlin Leni filmed here, 1936. Surely, the succeeding horrific actions of the regime she served were not her creation.

4. Gold Medals or Just Plain Bling? The Olympic gold medals awarded today are not what they seem. The 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th modern Summer Games (St. Louis 1904, London 1908, and Stockholm 1912, respectively) issued pure gold (14k) medals. However, because World War I intervened in 1914, a lot of metals, including gold, became even scarcer after 1917. So by Antwerp 1920, the "gold" medals awarded to the victors, really became just gold-plated medallions, 6 grams over sterling silver content. This is how the Summer medals are minted today. The Winter medals contain even slightly less gold content but come in a variety of designs and other materials (e.g., crystal, stone, lacquer, recycled metals) than the summer counterparts. Prior to the record-breaking sale of Mark Wells’ Lake Placid 1980 gold medal in November 2010 for $310,700, the highest price fetched for a pure gold medal was $50,000 for the St. Louis 1904 gold medal of George Eyser for the Climbing event.

The most amazing thing about George Eyser was that he won 6 medals at St. Louis 1904 (3 golds, two silvers and one bronze) despite wearing a wooden prosthesis for his left leg which was lost as a youth in a railway accident. Only one other prosthesis-wearing athlete has competed in the regular Olympics since (Natalie Do Toit), and this is also because since the 1960s, the Paralympics now cater to the needs of handicapped athletes.

5. The Double-Purloined NBC logo. While this might seem a subject more for corporate network intramurals, nevertheless, I include it here because NBC , the National Broadcasting Corporation, has been the premier American television network for the Olympics successively for the last 24 years and at least up to 2020. And I have first-hand authority on this story. Thus, as first revealed in the 2012 print edition of this book, is a story that perhaps might help NBC recover some $55,000 it paid in past damages to a third party if the statute of limitations already has not passed.

As NBC approached its 50^th anniversary in 1975, the network commissioned a new logo from (then) Lippincott & Margulies, a corporate branding firm. The resulting logo was a stylized, trapezoidal “N,” which logo the network hoped would carry them into the coverage of the Moscow 1980 Games.

Who was really first? How old was Nebraska’s? The UN Yearbook is clearly 1963.

At about the same time the Peacock network was trumpeting its new corporate identity, I was working for Unipub, a company in New York (since defunct) which sold publications of the United Nations by mail order when I discovered the cover (above, left) of the 1963 Yearbook of the United Nations. Eureka!

In February 1976, Nebraska ETV Network sued NBC for trademark infringement because the new NBC logo was virtually identical to the Nebraska ETV Network logo, except in coloring. NBC settled out-of-court and gave Nebraska ETV new equipment and a mobile color unit, valued at over $800,000, plus $55,000 to cover the cost of designing and implementing a new logo.

But who was really first with the design?

It was later that I learned of the lawsuit. However, at that time I was just getting my feet wet in the U.S. and New York, and was thus not legally-savvy about such things nor did I know how or where to proceed properly with my “discovery.” I just didn’t know.

(In the meantime, life intervened and I moved around the country (Los Angeles, back to New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc.) and had completely forgotten about the dust jacket until I started writing this book in 2009. Like Hal Prieste and his Olympic flag saga, the dust jacket would have lain buried and forgotten in my old files had it not been for me digging up old Olympic files to do research for this book.)

It was most puzzling that the United Nations never weighed in on the matter. Clearly, the “N” on the U.N. Yearbook cover is the same idea and predates the NBC-Nebraska tussle by about a dozen years. So a number of questions crop up:

•when did Nebraska create and copyright its logo: pre- or post-1963?

•did the U.N. copyright its artwork or was it automatically covered by copyright law anyway?

•is the Nebraska station liable to the United Nations?

•was Lippincott doubly remiss in its IP (intellectual property) searches work for its client?

•might NBC still recover any of its damages?

But for the author, there is an even stranger postscript to this story. NBC turned me down as a researcher/fact checker when they covered the Centennial Games in Atlanta in 1996. What other discoveries might I possibly have made had they put me on the payroll then?