Christopher Booker

Rings of steel

No one does Olympic bombast like a totalitarian dictatorship, as I discovered in Moscow

Last August I was intrigued to learn that the cash-strapped Cornwall county council was spending hundreds of pounds advertising for a ‘project officer’ at £400 a week to assist in ‘the successful delivery of the Olympic Torch Relay in May 2012’. The lucky applicant’s job would be ‘to raise awareness of this event throughout Cornwall’, while ‘stimulating excitement for the London 2012 Olympic Games’.

My earliest memory of the Olympics is of getting up at 3 a.m. in 1948 to stand by a roadside in Chard, Somerset, to cheer a lone runner as he carried the Olympic flame past us in the darkness for that year’s yachting events in Torquay. The few hundred who braved that morning’s cold had not needed the services of a council official to draw our attention to this spectacle — nor were we aware that this torch ceremony was not some ancient Olympic tradition but had only been dreamed up, under the auspices of Herr Goebbels, for the previous Games in Berlin in 1936.

Although I have followed the Olympics closely ever since, the only Games I was ever lucky enough to attend were in Moscow in 1980, which I covered for the Daily Mail. No others in my lifetime would I rather have been present at: it was a historic experience.

Not the least dramatic moment of those two weeks was the opening ceremony, staged in such unprecedentedly spectacular fashion as a showcase for Soviet Communism that it set the benchmark for opening ceremonies ever since. The highlight came when the torch carrier crossed the vast Lenin Stadium, then had to run up a platform of shields raised over their heads by thousands of Red Army soldiers, to send a burst of flame billowing from the great bowl high above us.

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