How Leni Riefenstahl shaped the modern Olympics

It’s an uncomfortable truth, but the Olympic Games in their modern form were pretty much invented by the Nazis. They came up with the idea of the torch relay, for example, the one that begins in Olympia and ends with the lighting of the cauldron at the opening ceremony. But it wasn’t the events at the 1936 Olympics that were new, so much as the way they were presented and filmed.

Even today, the style of coverage owes much to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite filmmaker and arguably the most gifted and influential female director of the 20th century. Her ground-breaking techniques, as seen in her cinematic masterpiece Olympia, included low camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups and tracking shots in a trench she had arranged to be dug alongside the long-jump pit. She also attached automatic cameras to balloons to get aerial shots for the first time.

Her greatest innovation was the use of waterproof cameras that worked in the swimming pool.