Why does USA not dip their flag at the Olympics opening ceremony?
The Star Spangled Banner will remain high and proud.
The "dipping" of one’s national flag in the Olympics opening ceremony when passing the host nation’s officials is a long-held tradition, meant as a sign of respect to whoever is the host of that year’s Games.
In fact, it has been official Olympic policy to do so since the inaugural Parade of Nations at the 1908 Olympic Games.
Not us, says the United States.
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Competing at every Games, summer and winter, since the first modern Olympics in 1896 – except for the 1980 Moscow Games, which it led a boycott of to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – the US is the winningest nation in Olympic history, with nearly 3,000 total medals.
Yet for almost a century – every Olympic Games since 1936, and a few before that too – Team USA has refused to follow the flag-dipping procedure stuck to by (most) other nations over the years.
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So, why do the Americans, on a stage where they have excelled to an unparalleled degree, refuse to dip their flag at the Olympics? RadioTimes.com explains all.
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Why does USA not dip their flag at the Olympics opening ceremony?
The USA has a long-standing tradition of refusing to dip their flag at the Olympic opening ceremony, which is believed to have started back at the 1908 Games in London.
Then, shot put gold medallist and flag bearer Ralph Rose – an Irish-American – kept the 'Stars and Stripes' held high at the opening ceremony, an action believed to be in protest of the English monarchy.
The next several Olympics were a mixed bag, depending largely on who the US flag bearer was and their wishes at the time. For example, the American flag was dipped at Sweden 1912, waved high at Belgium 1920, dipped again at Paris 1924 and held aloft at Amsterdam 1928, before the Games were held in Los Angeles in 1932.
But in 1936, with Berlin hosting the Olympics – meaning dipping the flag would be a show of respect to Adolf Hitler – the US Olympic Committee made it official policy in advance that the American flag would not be dipped.
The following decade it then became US law, under the Flag Code, that "the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing" – meaning since then, individual flag bearers haven’t exactly had much say in the matter.
Other countries over the years have declined to dip their own flags, from the old Soviet Union in the 1950s to a whopping 60 of the 64 countries at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) still officially recommends that its tradition is adhered to, and most countries do honour that in the present day.
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