- What are the Olympic rings?
- Origin and history of the Olympic rings
- The myth of the “Olympic stone”
- Other symbols of the International Olympic Games
We explain what the Olympic rings are, what they mean and how they originated. In addition, we tell you the myth of the Olympic stone.
The Olympic rings are present on the Olympic flag and are a symbol of the Olympics.What are the Olympic rings?
The Olympic rings or Olympic rings are the main symbol of the Olympic Games Internationals, the most important international sporting event in the contemporary world. It consists of five circles of different colors: blue, yellow, black, red and green, arranged in that order and intertwined with each other, all arranged on a white background.
These rings are present on the Olympic flag and, together with the Olympic flame and the Olympic creed, constitute the universal symbols of the Olympics: an event in which every four years athletes from all over the world meet to compete in different disciplines and formats.
The five colors of the Olympic rings represent the colors common to all the flags of the world, that is, any existing flag contains one of these colors. In this way, the rings represent unity, fraternity and communion between nations, which are essential Olympic values.
The Olympic rings appear on Olympic medals, Olympic posters and advertisements, souvenirs, philately and everything related to this great event of the sport.
Origin and history of the Olympic rings
The symbol of the Olympic rings was created at the beginning of the 20th century by Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), one of the founders of the Olympic movement, inspired by the emblem of the Union of French Athletic Sports Societies (Union des sociétés françaises de sports athlétiques) and in classical representations of the marriage, in which two interlocking rings are shown.
De Coubertin himself explained in an interview in 1913 that the selection of colors came from the flags of the participating nations at that time (Germany, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Spain, the United States, France, Greece, Hungary, England, Japan, Italy, Sweden), but which had finally formed "a truly international emblem", since all the flags of the world have at least one of these colors.
The myth of the “Olympic stone”
There is also a myth which supposes the origin of the symbol in a stone discovered in archaeological sites of Delphi, Greece, where the Pythian Games were celebrated in honor of Apollo in ancient times.
This version is false and is due to the fact that, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Carl Diem, president of the organizing committee, ordered the manufacture of a stone with this Olympic symbol printed on all four sides and its installation in Greece. From there, three runners departed with the Olympic torch for that year to the German capital, in a gesture that linked the ancient and modern Olympic tradition.
But the organizers forgot to remove the stone at the end of the Olympics, and in the late 1950s two British writers took it for granted, claiming in a book on the history of the modern Olympics that the emblem had been created in the Antiquity. This mistake is known as "Carl Diem's stone".
Other symbols of the International Olympic Games
In addition to the Olympic rings, the Olympics have two important symbols:
- The Olympic flag. It consists of a white box with a 2:3 ratio, on which the five Olympic rings appear. It is hoisted at all the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games from 1920 to the present.
- The Olympic torch. It consists of a torch that is lit at the beginning of the Olympic Games, in a tradition inherited from Greek Antiquity. It commemorates the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, in the Greek mythology, and delivering him to the humanity. It has been used in every edition of the Olympics since 1928.