Two countries brought the same flag to the 1936 Olympics

In the days before the 1936 Olympics opened in Berlin, Liechtenstein's team made a discovery. Haiti's plain flag, the version without its coat of arms, was two horizontal stripes, blue over red. Liechtenstein's flag was two horizontal stripes, blue over red.

The two flags had separate histories. Liechtenstein's colors went back to 1764, when Prince Joseph Wenzel I adopted blue and red as his livery colors. In 1852 they replaced the gold and red on the country's flag, and the constitution of 1921 made the blue and red flag official.

Haiti adopted its first flag on May 18, 1803. According to Haitian tradition, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines took a French tricolor, tore out the white middle stripe and threw it away, and his goddaughter Catherine Flon sewed the blue and red back together. The republicans under Alexandre Pétion later turned the stripes horizontal.

The match was first noticed in Berlin. It was Liechtenstein's first Summer Olympics, and its Olympic committee had been founded only the year before.

The two teams agreed to carry different flags at the opening ceremony. Haiti had one athlete, René Ambroise, a weightlifter who was studying in Paris. He carried the Haitian flag with the national coat of arms added. Liechtenstein's government approved a flag carried upside down, red over blue, with a gold prince's crown in the corner.

Ambroise never got to lift. The day after the opening ceremony he tore a muscle in his right leg in training, badly enough to be taken to the hospital.

Liechtenstein kept the crown. The government added it to the flag to mark the country as a principality and to tell the flag apart from Haiti's, and the new design became official on June 24, 1937. The crown was redrawn in 1982. The stripes stayed blue over red: blue for the sky, red for the evening fires lit inside the country's houses.