The 2016 Summer Olympic Games begin this year on the 5th of August in their Rio de Janeiro location. The official website trumpets cutting edge logistics lined up for the event:
“The competition venues will be clustered in four zones – Barra, Copacabana, Deodoro and Maracanã – and connected by a high-performance transport ring. Nearly half of the athletes will be able to reach their venues in less than 10 minutes, and almost 75 per cent will do so in less than 25 minutes.”
There will be plenty of good “high-performance” spectacles during the Games — not just speedy mechanical transport rings but also amazing athletic feats which will more than fill in whatever viewing void you might have foreseen for August.
We recently corresponded with a few different people at the Olympic Committee offices. One of the scripted series we do clearance work for needed to know if they could feature reproductions of some historic (circa 1900) Olympic medals. We were reminded, in pursuing the answer, that the Olympics logo is not an easy one to feature on-screen.
The Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee owns the trademark for the Olympic medal insignia – the famous interlocking rings, the word “Olympics,” etcetera. Use of any of those items on-screen requires IOC permission. Because the Olympic rings appeared on that 1904 medal our t.v. show wanted to use and because the IOC owns the trademark for those rings, permission was needed for that use. So even though the 100+ year-old medal might not look exactly the way the ones awarded in Rio will look, permission is still needed.
A special U.S. federal statute called the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act (36 U.S.C. §220506, from 1998) protects “all Olympic imagery and terminology (such as the word OLYMPIAD).” Wikipedia describes the Act as a law “that charters and grants monopoly status to the United States Olympic Committee.” The Wikipedia entry provides examples of enforcement of the Act, saying that the “United States Olympic Committee has used the law to force the ‘Gay Olympics’ to change their name to the Gay Games. The organization has threatened to use the law against the ‘Redneck Olympics,’ though it has given special dispensation to the Special Olympics.”
For our specific request of last month, the Olympics passed on the use, explaining that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not approve the replication of medals. They further noted that having fictional characters wear medals in a media project is another use that they would decline because the IOC only endorses on-screen use of medals that are “factually correct.” My reading between the lines here tells me that the only on-screen use they might consider approving would be a non-fiction project featuring the portrayal of an actual Olympic medal winner. All this is food for thought for any producer getting creative ideas as he or she watches this summer’s athletic festivities.
The use of actual Olympic medals on-screen would involve some hefty insurance coverage, I would assume, and since the IOC does not consent to the reproduction of replicas for films, the Olympic Museum can make official copies of medals available for film/television production use. A further point of clarification re: medal use: a generic gold/silver/bronze medal with no Olympic identification on it may be used in a production, but it cannot be referred to as an “Olympic medal” on-screen.
Here are a some movies about Olympic competition that have been released in the last 40+ years. Please note that these are not being offered as examples of films vetted by the current IOC media use guidelines (many of the films were released before the 1998 Ted Stevens act). They will, however, get you in the mood for Rio from August 5-21:
Chariots of Fire (1981)
Cool Runnings (1993)
The Cutting Edge (1992)
Miracle (2004)
Munich (2005)
One Day in September (1999)
Personal Best (1982)
Prefontaine (1997)
Walk, Don’t Run (1966)
Without Limits (1998)
First published July, 2016