After nearly three months of behind-the-scenes efforts, U.S. Olympic officials succeeded Wednesday in having the “ground zero” American flag make a dramatic entry during Friday night’s Opening Ceremony for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee bowed to pressure and allowed U.S. athletes to carry the tattered, highly symbolic flag into Rice-Eccles Stadium, where it will be raised unless wind or other bad weather threatens its already delicate condition.
That represents a compromise between the IOC’s previous insistence that protocol would allow it to approve only raising the symbolic flag and the U.S. Olympic Committee’s suggestion to have the flag carried by athletes at the back of the U.S. delegation during the parade of nations in the Opening Ceremony.
“We didn’t want some ceremony with the flag that didn’t include the athletes,” said Dwight Bell, the chef de mission (team leader) of the 2002 U.S. Olympic team.
Bell has been involved since November in discussions about using the flag, which was found buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the buildings and killed nearly 3,000 people.
“It was suggested by some athletes after they saw it flown at the World Series,” Bell said. “We pursued the idea in anticipation of using it as a show of solidarity with the American people.”
To the IOC, which governs the Olympics but had no U.S. member on its executive committee when discussions about the flag were taking place, the resonance of the issue to the American public became clear only Tuesday.
The IOC’s initial decision had quickly become fodder for protest on talk shows and prompted an outpouring of critical e-mails and phone messages to USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs. The U.S. public already looked at the IOC with a jaundiced eye after two dozen of its members were implicated in a bribery scandal related to Salt Lake City’s bid for these Winter Olympics.
Mitt Romney, the onetime U.S. Senate candidate who is head of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, had a politician’s sense of the public’s feelings. When Romney issued a statement Tuesday night criticizing the IOC’s decision not to allow U.S. athletes to carry the flag, the IOC began to get the message that protocol should not stand in the way of patriotism in the post-Sept. 11 United States.
“We had been in discussions about this compromise,” Bell said. “Mitt seemed to send different signals. Then the story broke before we worked out the details.”
Not long after the media received Romney’s statement, there was a quickly-arranged, two-hour meeting on the flag issue. It included Romney, IOC President Jacques Rogge of Belgium, IOC Director General Francois Carrard of Switzerland, USOC President Sandra Baldwin and two of the IOC members from the United States, Anita DeFrantz and Bob Ctvrtlik.
“There has been a patriotic wave we haven’t seen in a long time,” Baldwin said. “Many of our athletes wanted to have something that showed they were here to do the best for their country.”
Baldwin conceded having the U.S. carry the flag behind its entire team could be seen as a slight to the other 79 nations whose citizens died in the World Trade Center collapse or other nations that have endured tragedies.
The raising of the American flag comes in a part of the Olympic Opening Ceremony under the jurisdiction of the host nation.
“This is American heroes, American victims, the American flag, the national anthem,” Carrard said. “The heroes are American, and we think the athletes who carry the flag should be too.”
Eight U.S. athletes, one from each of the eight winter sports federations, will accompany the ground zero flag, along with Sgt. Antonio Scannella and Officer Francis Accardi of the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Police and other American heroes.
Short-track speedskater Amy Peterson will open her fifth Winter Olympics by carrying the U.S. flag into the Opening Ceremony.
Jim Shea Jr. was chosen to give the athlete’s oath and carry the U.S. flag at the front of the U.S. delegation in the parade of nations.
