We wanted to touch on a cou­ple of top­ics of the his­tory of the Olympic games to pay homage to this sport­ing event as it is cur­rently being cel­e­brated in Lon­don. Form its revival in 1896 thanks in great part to Baron de Cou­bertin, to the infa­mous treat­ment given to Olympic Gold Medal­ist Jesse Owens by the Nazi regime and Hitler in Ger­many and the White House and the pres­i­dent in his native coun­try in 1936, to the Olympic Flame and all the ideals it represents.

Lets start with Pierre, the Baron de Cou­bertin, who served as the 2nd Pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tional Olympic Com­mit­tee, but his impor­tance in the Olympic Move­ment far over­shad­ows that sim­ple state­ment. Although recent schol­ar­ship has shown that he was not the only per­son who had the idea to begin inter­na­tional Olympic Games, he is cer­tainly the per­son still mostly respon­si­ble for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896. For this effort, he is cor­rectly termed le réno­va­teur.

Born in Paris as Pierre Frédy, he was descended from a noble line which had lived in France for over 500 years. After his pre­lim­i­nary stud­ies he entered law school in 1884 although he never intended to prac­tice law, and he left after one year, enrolling instead in the École libre de sci­ences poli­tiques. Cou­bertin had early on decided that his goal would be the reform of the French edu­ca­tional system.

Some his­to­ri­ans describe Cou­bertin as the insti­ga­tor of the mod­ern Olympic move­ment, a man whose vision and polit­i­cal skill led to the revival of the Olympic Games which had been prac­ticed in antiq­uity. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years in the Greek city of Olympia, in the King­dom of Elis, from 776 BCE through either 261 or 393 AD.

In 1936, Jesse Owens, the son of a share­crop­per and grand­son of slaves, went to the Olympics in Berlin and upset Hitler’s visions of Aryan supremacy. He did it not once, but four times, won gold medals in the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, the long jump and the 4 x 100 meter relay.

The first race was cap­tured by the Ger­man filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefen­stahl in her famous film doc­u­ment­ing the 1936 Games, Olympia. It’s all queued up below and ready to go.

After his four vic­to­ries, Owens returned to the U.S. and imme­di­ately con­fronted the cold racist atti­tudes of his coun­try­men. There was no pause, no reprieve, even for an Olympic gold medal­ist. Later, he recalled:

When I came back to my native coun­try, after all the sto­ries about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the Pres­i­dent, either.

New York City did hold a ticker-tape parade in his honor. But when he attended a recep­tion at the Waldorf-Astoria, he was forced to ride the freight ele­va­tor. And he didn’t make it to the White House until Eisen­hower named him an “Ambas­sador of Sports” in 1955. FDR and Tru­man never both­ered to extend an invi­ta­tion to the Olympic hero.

For all the recent scan­dal and the trauma of past Games, the Olympics remain a pageant of grandeur and glory, and there is no greater sym­bol of its ideals than the Olympic Flame. The video below, from the Ontario Sci­ence Cen­tre, explains the evolv­ing tech­nol­ogy that keeps the flame burn­ing from its light­ing to the clos­ing cer­e­monies. It’s a pretty cool story, set to a bom­bas­tic sound­track wor­thy of its sub­ject and car­ried by an ani­mated run­ner who just peeled him­self off of an ancient Athen­ian vase.

Intro­duced in the 1928 Sum­mer Olympics in Ams­ter­dam, the flame revives a sym­bol from antiq­uity, com­mem­o­rat­ing Prometheus’s audac­ity and remind­ing war­ring city states to put aside hos­til­i­ties for as long as it burned. In the mod­ern Olympics, between the light­ing and the open­ing cer­e­monies, the flame, in its styl­ized torch, makes a pil­grim­age to the host city via relay, a prac­tice that began with the 1936 games in Berlin. This year’s relay started on May 19th in Land’s End in Corn­wall and ends this Fri­day, the 27th at the open­ing cer­e­mony in Lon­don. The torch will have trav­eled through 1,000 places in the UK, cov­ered a total of 8,000 miles (and pass­ing through 8,000 hands), mov­ing over land, air, and water, with­out once hav­ing to be relit.