Olympic flame (magazine)
Olympic Fire (OF) is a magazine of the German Olympic Society (DOG). In terms of content, the magazine deals with Olympic or related topics from the fields of sport, society, culture and history.
The magazine was initially published every month, then around the year 2000 every other month and finally four times a year until 2016 with a circulation of 5,000 copies (as of 02/2013). It was not available at the kiosk, but was sent to the members of the DOG by post by spring 2017. The booklets can also be downloaded free of charge in PDF format from the DOG website. The first edition appeared in 1951, when the sports official Carl Diem was the editor-in-chief .
The editorial board included Michael Gernandt and Steffen Haffner , both ex-sports directors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . The magazine was designed by a four-person editorial team from Dreieich's Peter Kühne Verlag (as of 03/2014), but the articles also came from athletes or officials.
Dr. When Thomas Bach took office in 2006 as President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB), which was formed from the National Olympic Committee (NOK) and the German Sports Confederation (DSB), his Secretary General Michael Vesper removed the 50,000 euro subsidy paid annually for printing costs because the contents of this magazine were critical to the NOK and DSB. As a result, the DOG gradually lost important advertising customers for the remaining financing of the OF. Additional dissonances with the main contributors, their outstanding fee claims, forced the DOG Presidium to give up. In autumn 2017, the long-time editor-in-chief Harald Pieper (Neu-Isenburg), who had made the OF into one of the most important sports magazines in Germany up to the last print edition 1/2017 for the time being, resigned.
Since March 2020, under the direction of the former TV, radio and print sports journalist and DOG presidium member Hans-Joachim Lorenz (Berlin), the ´Olympic Fire` has been constantly updated in digital form.