If you want to know how the Olympic torch really began its “Journey of Harmony,” as China calls its current relay, if you want to see why the torch has had to pass through a human obstacle course composed of protesters, SWAT teams and police officers in San Francisco, Paris and London, then do not look to Tibet’s grievances against China. Look to the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film, Olympia.

In that homage to Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games, the origins of this ritual are revealed. Never before had a lighted torch been relayed from a Greek temple in Olympia to an athletic competition.

So Riefenstahl creates the myth the Greeks never got around to telling. The camera begins by surveying a misty landscape of ruins, of shattered pillars and overgrown grasses. It then reveals a Greek temple standing amid the stones. Heads and the bodies of Greek statues appear in an eerie erotic landscape. Lighting the Olympic torch, another nude acolyte triumphantly. Humanity is given its purpose; the relay begins. The torch is conveyed from one bearer to the next and ends in Berlin at a 1,10,000-seat stadium, where it ignites an altar of flame. Through shimmering heat, the sun itself can be seen, vibrating in sympathy. And Hitler salutes the crowds.

This passing of the torch thus demonstrates a lineage of inheritance — a historical relay — making Nazi Germany the living heir to ancient Greece. A claim was being staked.

This claim was not unrelated to the very existence of the Olympic Games. As Nigel Spivey shows in his book, The Ancient Olympics, many different traditions, myths and cults fed the Greek games. But the founding of the modern Olympics was far more straightforward. A German scholar, J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) proposed excavating Olympia, the ancient site of the Greek games; the honour was eventually left to a 19th-century German scholar, Ernst Curtius. It was a Frenchman, however, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern international Olympics with the first games in 1896, explicitly declaring that the French should reconstitute what the Germans had exhumed. The implied rivalry was more bloodily enacted in the battlefield beginning in 1914, two years before Germany was supposed to host the games for the first time.

Then, after its defeat, Germany was banned from the Olympics in 1920 and 1924. So hosting the games in Berlin in 1936 was a kind of restitution, like the one the Nazis sought on a grander scale, undoing the humiliating post-World War I penalties. But Hitler wanted the torch fully in German hands. He authorised a resumption of German excavations at Olympia while an organiser of the 1936 games, Carl Diem, came up with the idea of the relay.

“In 1940,” Hitler told the Nazi architect Albert Speer, “the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come.” Speer was to build a 4,00,000-seat stadium in Nuremberg as the Olympics’ permanent home.

Now, despite China’s attempt to put a smiley face on the torch relay — “Light the Passion Share the Dream,” says the Chinese Web site — the Tibetan protests have laid bare its nationalist essence.

The Greeks themselves were more forthright. They believed, Spivey suggests, that “all games were war games.” At any rate, all games were as serious as war, and none were about the brotherhood of all mankind.

Perhaps, then, pretense should be eliminated. The Olympic Games should simply acknowledge that they reflect wars fought by other means. Not a pleasant thought, but perhaps closer to the truth than the perspective of Avery Brundage, the fifth president of the International Olympic Committee, who just after the 1936 Berlin games said they proved that the Olympics are “the most effective influence towards international peace and harmony yet devised.”