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Watching the Flame
As I sat watching the XXV Winter Olympic Games opening ceremony, I realized how many questions the flame raises that none of us ever seem to answer.
We know how to react to it. We fall quiet. We lean forward. We let the moment wash over us. The torch moves through the stadium, hand to hand, and when the cauldron ignites, something collective clicks into place. This matters. This is old. This is good.
But sitting there, I found myself wondering things no one around me could explain.
Where does that flame actually come from?
Does it ever go out?
Who keeps it between Games?
Has it always been done this way?
These are not cynical questions. They are ordinary ones. The kind you ask when a ritual is so familiar that you suddenly realize you do not understand it at all.
The answers, it turns out, are more modern and more human than the ceremony suggests.
The Olympic Games themselves began in ancient Greece, held every four years in Olympia as a religious festival honoring the gods. Fires burned on altars during the competitions, symbolizing devotion and continuity. When the Games ended, those fires were extinguished.
The ritual mattered, but it was temporary by design.
The ancient Olympics ended in the fourth century and The Games disappeared entirely for more than a thousand years.
When the modern Olympics were revived in 1896, they were not a continuation so much as a reconstruction. The driving force was Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and historian. His reasons were not mystical. They were practical and very nineteenth century.
He believed organized sport could build character and discipline in an industrializing world. That shared rules and international competition might redirect rivalry away from war. The revived Olympics were meant to shape bodies and societies, not summon ancient magic.
The symbols came later.
The first modern Olympic flame appeared in 1928, burning quietly in the stadium for the duration of the Games before being extinguished.
There was no torch relay yet. No journey. Just a visual marker that something collective was taking place.
The torch relay was introduced in 1936, at the Berlin Olympics.
This is where the history sharpens.
The relay was formalized under Nazi Germany, a regime that understood symbolism with chilling precision. The Nazis used spectacle, repetition, and visual storytelling to suggest racial superiority, historical inevitability, and national destiny. A flame carried across borders, welcomed by crowds and filmed again and again, implied legitimacy without ever having to argue for it.
This is the uncomfortable truth beneath the ceremony. A tradition we now associate with peace was refined by the Nazi regime.
That sentence alone feels wrong to say out loud. It should.
Nazi Germany did not invent the Olympics, but it did shape one of their most beloved modern rituals. And yet, here we are. Cheering. Crying. Teaching our children to watch the flame with reverence.
That raises a harder question than where the flame came from.
We are often clear about what we refuse to celebrate. We argue fiercely that symbols matter, because they do. We say, correctly, that honoring something is not neutral.
So…what do we do with this?
Do we believe nothing good can survive a bad origin?
Or do we believe meaning can be reclaimed?
The world chose not to discard the Olympic flame after the war.
Instead, it changed who carried it and what it was allowed to represent.
The same mechanics remained. Fire, movement, repetition. But the intent shifted. The torch now passes through the hands of nurses, refugees, elders, children. It moves across borders not to claim dominance, but to signal participation.
We decided, collectively, that a symbol once used to divide could be repurposed to gather.
That decision does not erase its history. It sits beside it.
Each Games still begins the same way. The flame is lit anew in Olympia, Greece, at the Temple of Hera. It is not carried forward from the last Olympics. It is not preserved between them. It burns for the duration of the Games and is extinguished again.
Watching it this time, in winter, that detail felt more important than I expected. The fire felt less symbolic and more necessary, the way fire always does when the days are short. Not something inherited, but something made again on purpose.
Especially now, in a country where we argue endlessly about symbols. What they mean. Who owns them. Whether they redeem or condemn. Often without asking where they came from or how they were once used.
We watch the Olympics and feel pride for our country. We cheer under shared rules, alongside rivals, without demanding purity. Then we step outside our doors and tear one another apart.
The power of the flame is not that it never goes out.
It is that we light it again.
We inherit rituals, but we also inherit the responsibility to understand them. Knowing the full history does not strip a symbol of meaning. It gives us the chance to choose what it carries forward.
If something shaped in darkness can be carried toward light, deliberately and honestly, then transformation is possible.
And if we can manage that kind of compromise on the world stage, surrounded by flags, anthems, and history we cannot undo, the harder question is why it feels so impossible at home.
The flame does not ask us to believe it is ancient.
It asks us to pay attention.
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