The Olympic Torch Relay Is Not Ancient — It Was Invented in 1936

The oldest-looking thing at the Games is among the newest

A flame lit at Olympia, carried by hand across a continent, arriving to open the Games — nothing about the Olympics looks more ancient.

The relay was invented in the 1930s.

The idea came from Carl Diem, Secretary General of the organising committee for the 1936 Berlin Games. The IOC approved it in May 1934, and the first relay ran in 1936.

There is no classical precedent for it. The ancient Games did not carry fire to a host city, because they had no host city — they were held at Olympia.

The flame and the relay are different things

These get merged constantly, and the dates separate them.

The Olympic flame returned to the modern Games in 1928. The relay — carrying it from Olympia to wherever the Games are held — arrived eight years later.

So the flame has a slightly longer modern history, and the journey has none at all before 1936.

This is the same confusion that surrounds the founding date of the Games themselves, where the IOC’s own position is that 776 BC is the first written mention rather than a founding, and the Olympic rings, designed in 1913 and routinely described as though they carried ancient meaning.

Designed to look inherited

The ceremony’s staging was deliberate. The flame was lit at Olympia on 20 July 1936, among ancient ruins, using a parabolic mirror to concentrate the sun — the same method still used today.

Then 3,422 bearers, each running about a kilometre, carried it to Berlin.

Every element was chosen to feel continuous with antiquity: the site, the mirror rather than a match, the white robes, the procession. It is an invented ritual designed to be mistaken for an inherited one, and it succeeded so completely that the invention is now the surprising fact.

The context has to be stated

The first torch relay was staged by the organising committee of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a Games used extensively by the Nazi government for propaganda.

That is part of the documented record of how this tradition began, and a page describing the relay’s origins would be incomplete without it.

It is also, separately, true that the relay has since been run for ninety years by many countries and carries meanings entirely unconnected to its first outing. Both things are historically accurate, and neither cancels the other.

Why invented traditions stick

The relay endured because it works — it gives the Games a beginning, a physical link between the host and the sport’s origin, and a story that can be followed for weeks before anyone competes.

Sport is full of these. The marathon’s 26.2 miles comes from one course in 1908 and is routinely attributed to an ancient run. The Masters green jacket was a members’ garment before it was a prize.

A tradition does not need to be old to be real. It only needs to be repeated — and the confident histories attached to it afterwards are usually the least reliable part.

More origin questions are in sports history.