1948 – Fun and Games

The modern Olympic Games began in 1896, when the ‘Games of the Olympiad’ were held in Athens. About 100,000 people attended the opening, and the games attracted 245 competitors, of whom more than 200 were Greek, the rest represented 14 other countries. Despite Greece having the majority of athletes, the U.S. finished with the most champions, with eleven placed first in their events as compared to ten from Greece.  A small beginning, but no international events of this magnitude had been organised before.  Female athletes were not allowed to compete, although one Greek woman, Stamata Revithi, ran the marathon course on her own, saying “If the committee doesn’t let me compete I will go after them regardless”.  Four years later, women appeared in sailing, golf, tennis – and croquet!  By the time of the Games of 1928, women were taking part in track and field events, too.

By 1948, there had been only three occasions on which the four-yearly Olympic Games hadn’t taken place over the previous 54 years.  The Games scheduled for 1916 in Berlin was cancelled, with the First World War underway, and similarly those scheduled for 1940 (planned for Tokyo, which eventually hosted the Games for the first time in 1964) and 1944 (scheduled to take place in London) were also cancelled, this time because of the Second World War.  After 1916, Berlin did host a Games for the first time in 1936, and, recognising it was an ideal time to promote their ideology, the Nazi government commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to film the event.  Olympia is a flawed masterpiece.  It includes an almost erotic portrayal of the success of Aryan athletes, but it couldn’t avoid many ‘non-Aryan’ successes, especially with remarkable footage of Jesse Owens, the African American who won four gold medals in sprinting and the long jump for the USA.

Germany was to host a second Games in 1972, of course, and that was also famous for film footage:  on this occasion it was television coverage of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group which invaded the Olympic village, taking over the Israeli team apartment, killing two and holding 9 others as hostages. The terrorists demanded that Israel release numerous prisoners, and following a stand-off, the terrorists, still holding hostages, were offered safe passage and taken to an airport.  Ambushed by German security forces, 15 people, including the nine Israeli athletes and five of the terrorists, were killed. After much debate, the Games continued, but any reflection on what was the 20th Olympiad was and is dominated by that crisis and its aftermath.

As World War II had stopped the planned London Olympics, London put itself forward for 1948. Great Britain had almost handed the 1948 games over to the United States, given concerns over post-war financial and rationing problems, but the government and the king thought this could be the chance to restore Britain from any post-war blues.  Unsurprisingly, the event became known as the Austerity Games, given the difficult economic climate and rationing.  The athletes were lucky, given the same increased rations as dockers and miners, 5,467 calories a day instead of the normal 2,600.  No new venues were built for the games, with most events taking place at the Wembley (Empire) Stadium.  The athletes were housed in existing accommodation, (there hadn’t been an Olympic Village in 1936, not would there be in 1952 in Helsinki).  In what was then a record, 59 nations were represented by 4,104 athletes, 3,714 men and 390 women participating in 19 sporting fields.  Germany and Japan were not invited, and Russia chose to send observers, not competitors, explaining it was focussed on planning for the 1952 Olympics.

The Games opened on 29 July. It was a suitably patriotic occasion.  Army bands began playing at 2 pm for the 85,000 spectators at the Wembley Stadium.  The international and national Olympic representatives arrived, closely followed by the royals, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and sundry others.  Soon after the now familiar parade of competitors entered, with the hosts, the United Kingdom last. The Chairman of the London Organising Committee began, “The hour has struck. A visionary dream has today become a glorious reality.  At the end of the worldwide struggle in 1945, many institutions and associations were found to have withered and only the strongest had survived. How, many wondered, had the great Olympic Movement prospered?”  Not expecting a reply, he continued, and went on to introduce what he hoped would be two weeks of “keen but friendly rivalry”, where London represented a “warm flame of hope for a better understanding in the world which has burned so low.”

The Austerity Games was a success.  The 580-page official report concluded:  “Thus were launched the Olympic Games of London, under the most happy auspices. The smooth-running Ceremony, which profoundly moved not only all who saw it but also the millions who were listening-in on the radio throughout the world, and the glorious weather in which it took place, combined to give birth to a spirit which was to permeate the whole of the following two weeks of thrilling and intensive sport.” [i]  The opening ceremony and over 60 hours of Games coverage were broadcast live on BBC television, then only available to a small audience in the London area.  The BBC paid £1,000 to broadcast events: television rights were much cheaper back then!

One of the great performances at the Games came from Dutch sprinter Fanny Blankers-Koen, the “The Flying Housewife”, a thirty-year-old mother of two who won four gold medals in athletics. And then there was Emil Zátopek, his first major appearance in what would prove to be the beginning of a career in which he dominated long-distance running.  Panting and wheezing as he ran, he was nicknamed “The Locomotive”.  In the 10,000m he lapped all but two runners and won by more than 300m. Three days later, Zátopek ran in the final of the 5,000m, and trailing by 50m at the start of the final lap, he closed the gap with a stunning sprint, but had to settle for silver.   No matter.  Four years later in Helsinki, Zátopek won the 10,000m and the 5,000m. He wasn’t finished, and entered the marathon, even though he had never run one before, and won by two-and-a-half minutes.  The only runner to win the 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon at the same Olympic Games, he was undefeated in his first 38 races over 10,000m from 1948 through to 1954.  Overall, the United States won the most gold and overall medals, Sweden second, and France came third in the medal standings. Am I surprised to see the host nation ended up twelfth!

Why dwell on the 1948 Austerity Games?  The answer sits in the comment the athletes were housed in existing accommodation.  Since I met them there, I thought that meant Greenford Grammar School for the Greek and Lebanese teams, where my dad was a physics teacher.  Like so many things, I was wrong in my assumptions, and I never thought to ask, or perhaps not bold enough to find out more. [ii]  Teams were housed in two locations; for the Greeks and Lebanese this was at the RAF Camp at nearby West Drayton.  Greenford Grammar was a base for the two teams to meet for social activities.  Not yet four years old, there is little I can remember now, just three images, all of them almost certainly reconstructions from stories told by my parents.

The first is from the London Zoo Elephant House.  There I am, around the back with my parents and the two Olympic teams, being introduced to the elephants, close up.  At one point one of the keepers fetches out one of those small mouth organs (a baby harmonica), and handed it over to an elephant.  Held in its trunk, the elephant played some notes: that put fun into the games!

The second comes from later that day, when we returned.  If I had been observant, I might have noticed my mother had been a little distracted, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t.  As we walked back into the school, there, by the front door, were several brown paper carrier bags containing the visitors’ lunch which had been forgotten.  Sandwiches and apples?  I believe so.  What happened to all that food?  I have no idea.  As for the third, it was more personal.  My parents busy, I was left in a school room: unable to get out, scared, that moment recurred in nightmares for years.

The Chairman of the London Olympics Organising Committee, had talked about “keen but friendly rivalry” in London, cherishing a “warm flame of hope for a better understanding in the world which has burned so low”.  Those words sound rather hollow today, as sport, including the Olympics, has become nastily competitive, with trickery, drugs and other problems

It wasn’t meant to be like that.  Baron Pierre de Coubertin was the instigator of the modern Olympic movement, and his determination to revive the Olympic Games was based on his idealised view of the Olympic Games as the ultimate ancient athletic competition.  His approach was based on a number of beliefs. He had read the ancient Olympics encouraged competition among amateur rather than professional athletes, and agreed. The ancient practice of a sacred truce in association with the Games might have suggested the Olympics could have a role in promoting peace. This was reinforced for Coubertin by the tendency of athletic competitions to promote understanding across cultures, a way to reduce the likelihood of war. In addition, he saw the Games as important in advocating his philosophical ideal for athletic competition: that the competition itself, the struggle to overcome one’s opponent, was more important than winning.  There’s no record as to what he felt about athletes performing in the nude in ancient times!

He was naïve, and in many ways mistaken.  He intended the Games to be a forum for amateur athletic competition, but his view of amateurism was complex.  In 1894, a Congress took place on establishing the modern Olympics.  Coubertin criticised the type of amateur competition to be seen in English rowing contests, a hang-over from the 19th Century English class-based view of gentlemen-athletes, where one had to be an ‘amateur’ to take part in important contests: upper class sportsmen were ‘amateurs’, sportsmen from the working classes were ‘professionals’.  He argued the specific exclusion of the working-class was wrong.  While he believed that athletes should not normally be paid, he felt compensation was in order when athletes were competing and would otherwise have been earning money.  However, his views his ran counter to the initial definition of an ‘amateur’ in the Olympics, someone who didn’t earn any money from sport.

This has been a never-ending source of argument.  Were the Games for amateurs only?  If so, what exactly was an amateur.  Can an amateur take part in contests in which professionals participated? Can someone be an amateur in one sport and a professional in another? Is a sports teacher a professional? Can a sports club pay the travelling expenses of an athlete?

The IOC justified its initial policy by referring to the past: then Greek athletes were amateurs and the only prize for an Olympic victory was an olive-crown.  Several scholars described the early Greek athletes as true amateurs and even considered the Hellenistic and Roman period, when professionalism came to the fore, as a period of decline, although athletics was being pursued more intensively than ever before. Today historians no longer believe Greek athletes were amateurs. Many were aristocrats, and they had no qualms in accepting prizes at the games, or at their homecoming. [iii]The requirement for amateur status at the Olympics ended in the 1980s.

There were other challenges.  Coubertin was against women participating in the Olympic games, suggesting they would be a distraction on the track and field for the male athletes.  Stamata Revithi had been unable to get any form of documentation for her marathon run in 1896, but, by 1900 women were in, albeit in very limited numbers to begin with. However, the major issue for the revival of the modern Olympics was politics.  With support to launch a Games in Athens in 1896, an International Olympic Committee (IOC) was formed , and, as work of the IOC focussed on planning, so Coubertin took on a background role, giving technical advice, even sketching a velodrome for the cycling competitions.  He was involved in planning the program, but to his disappointment polo and boxing were omitted.  In a further blow, after being told four foreign football teams were coming, none turned up, and the football tournament was cancelled.

Political issues were messy. Coubertin’s efforts to build interest in the Games in France faced problems, largely because the participation of German athletes angered many French, still angry over Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War.  Coubertin was frustrated by the Greeks, who wanted to hold the Games in Athens every four years.  He won in the end, taking over after Athens, but despite the initial success in Athens, the Olympics faced hard times.  The Paris Games of 1900 and the St Louis Games of 1904 became sideshows to the Exhibitions held in the two cities.  The Olympics survived these early problems, however, and grew steadily from 1908.

The Olympic Games are different now.  In Sydney in 2000, there was a wonderful sense of fun as well as earnest competition, but it was, I think, untypical.  Today the Games are about winning, often at any cost.  Drug use continues to roil most sports, as with the recent banning of a Chinese gold medal winning swimmer. [iv]  Our enjoyment of young brilliant gymnasts is muted as we read about years of abuse and manipulation, especially of young women. [v]

It’s easy to become very cynical, but there are some remarkable athletes around to counter-balance all the cheating, some less well-known than others.  Kim Rhode is a good example, a skeet and trap shooter, far from well-known yet one of the all-time Olympic greats.  She is one of only three women in Olympic history to win medals in six Olympic Games, (the other two in canoeing and rowing).  The first American to earn a medal on five different continents, her sixth consecutive medal tied her with luge champion Armin Zöggeler of Italy for most consecutive individual Olympic medals by any Olympian. [vi]  Like Emil Zátopek, Kim Rhode excelled for many years, a dedicated sportswoman, offering an example that overshadows the cheats and glory hunters.  I hope Kim Rhodes had fun while competing at her six Games:  she deserved it.

[i] Quoted from Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad London 1948 (1951). The Official Report of the Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad London 1948

[ii] A case of ‘I am Incurious and Yellow’?

[iii] http://ancientolympics.arts.kuleuven.be/eng/TD008EN.html

[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/sports/olympics/sun-yang-doping-ban.html

[v] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/sports/olympics/gymnastics-abuse-athlete-a.html

[vi] https://www.usashooting.org/12-the-team/usashootingteam/nationalteam/nationalshotgunteam/kimrhode

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