Icons
Icon of the month: Olympic rings
Simon Jones
From the archive: This article was first published in Summer
2008.
The hardest-fought competition at this summer’s olympics in Beijing
will probably be between Nike and Adidas. Each has around 4,000
retail outlets in China and both want more. Will Nike’s tactics of
sponsoring individual athletes bear most fruit, or will Adidas have
more advantage from being an official partner?
The gold medal for sports branding, however, has already been
won. More recognizable than even the inescapable McDonald’s logo,
the five Olympic rings have become the world’s most identifiable
symbol.1 They represent a sporting event, of course, but also stand
in for an ideal expressed by its founder, Baron Pierre de
Coubertin: ‘Union between men’.
As every aspiring athlete knows, each ring represents ‘the five
parts of the world which now are won over to Olympism and willing
to accept healthy competition.’2 Not the famous ‘Faster, higher,
stronger’, then, but a hint of ‘The most important thing is not to
win but to take part’, a well-worn cliché that de Coubertin first
heard in a sermon in London.
With ‘taking part’ being so critical to the endeavour, it is no
surprise that boycotting the games has become a powerful tool. Some
African countries refused to recognise their union with other
nations during apartheid; the games were used by both sides in the
Cold War to express their antipathy towards each other. Today
[2008], despite wide-ranging western criticism of China’s disregard
of human rights, there is a new unity of purpose: accessing its
burgeoning market. Claims that the spirit of ‘Olympism’ will force
change in the People’s Republic seem to imply that capitalism is
inherently fraternal. The market may not be a game that every
competitor can win – not when some players have structural
advantages – but it’s the taking part that counts.
The inspiration for the image was, some say, Carl Jung’s
illustration of the interlocking of masculine and feminine in two
overlapping circles (the idea that de Coubertin copied an old Greek
symbol is inaccurate, a myth caused by – who’d’ve thought it – the
careless reporting of a pair of British journalists).
This picture is not only intentionally human, but plays on the
idea of the circle as complete and inclusive. Not ‘linked’ so much
as always inseparable.
If the logo has a ‘spirit’ it lives in the stories of great
athletes, particularly of those who somehow transcend their sport
and their own physical abilities. Like Emil Zátopek, who grunted
his way to four gold medals (‘I was not talented enough to run and
smile at the same time’) but is remembered as much for initially
refusing to compete.
His fellow distance runner Stanislav Jungwirth had been omitted
from the Czech squad because of his father’s anti-Russian
activities. He was allowed to participate only when Zátopek
threatened to embarrass the government by excluding himself.
Zátopek went on to win gold, but on what should have been his
triumphant return to Prague he was instead punished for his
insubordination by being ordered to work as a street cleaner. He
arrived for duty the next day only to find the streets spotless,
his fellow citizens having paid their own respects.
This sentimental little tale sounds like a concoction but, true
or not, in 2000 when he was posthumously awarded the Pierre de
Coubertin medal, it stood as an inspiration to those seeking their
own understanding of the rings.
Perhaps the symbol thrives because it appeals to an ordinance
beyond the power of the nation. Perhaps it operates beyond
commercial chatter – piggybacking on it, urging the human to
circumvent the institutional. At a Chinese Olympics supported by
corporate cash, we may be about to find out.
1 The results of a survey carried out by Sponsorship Research
International in six countries (Australia, Germany, India, Japan,
Great Britain and the USA) in 1995 showed that 92% of those
questioned correctly identified the Olympic rings, which made them
the most-recognised symbol. They were followed by the McDonald’s
and Shell emblems (88%), Mercedes (74%) and the United Nations
(36%).
2 De Coubertin in the August 1913 edition of Revue Olympique.
Addendum: The strict legal protection of the rings in 2012 suggests
that, if the logo operates ‘beyond commercial chatter’, it is also
somewhat beholden by commerce. And yet, for all the chagrin about
London Olympic sponsorship, Games venues avoided the ad blitz now
typical of modern sport. The rings hung solo in the arena like a
cross in a chancel, looking back as much as looked upon.
