Olympic Flag Is Games’ Constant Symbol

The official flag raising at the Olympic Village on Thursday. Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressThe official flag raising at the Olympic Village on Thursday.

Every Olympics, it seems, there is a flap about flags: those not flown, those hung upside down, those from the wrong country. On Wednesday, the North Korean women’s soccer team walked off the field when the South Korean flag was shown on a video screen before the game. Questions have also been raised about whether the Americans will dip their flag when they walk past the Royal Box.

The Olympic flag, though, has provided one source of constancy. Since 1920, the flag and its five interconnected rings on a white background with no border has flown over the Games. The five rings – blue, black, and red on top and yellow and green below – are thought to represent Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and America, and the colors of the rings were supposedly chosen because “at least one of these colors can be found in the flag of every nation,” according to the Historical Dictionary of the Olympic Movement.

The Olympic flag that will be raised at the Opening Ceremony and will fly over the main stadium during the Games dates back to the 1980s. The original five-ringed flag first flew at the Antwerp Games in 1920 and was passed to the mayor of the next host city at the end of the games. That flag was known as the “Antwerp Flag.”

By 1984, the flag was tattered, so a replacement was produced out of fine Korean silk and first flown at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. A second “primary” Olympic flag is used for the Winter Games and was donated in 1952 by Oslo, the host city that year.

Flags have been a crucial part of the Olympics, according to Mark Dyreson, who has written several books about the Olympics, because they represent the unavoidable clash between nations.

“The paradox of the Olympics is it is a trans-national event, but it’s organized by nations and inherently nationalistic,” he said.

The Olympic flag is closely guarded and legally protected. But it has also been the target of a variety of pranks. In 1920, Hal Prieste, an American diver, was challenged by the Hawaiian swimmer and Olympic teammate, Duke Kahanamoku, to climb up a 15-foot flagpole and steal an Olympic flag.

Bill Mallon, an Olympic historian, said this flag was not the official flag, but a replica flying at the Games that year.

Nevertheless, 80 year later, Prieste returned it to the International Olympic Committee’s president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, at the Sydney Games.

“You can’t be selfish about these things,” Prieste said at a handover ceremony. Samaranch gave a commemorative Olympic medal in a box to Prieste who, by then hard of hearing, said, “What is it? Kleenex?”