IX Olympiad

George Russell

Description

The IX Olympiad, the ninth volume in The Olympic Century series, begins by exploring the Summer Games of Amsterdam, 1928, the first to feature the Olympic flame as well as the first to include track and field and gymnastics competitions for women.Well established as the world's greatest festival of sport, the Olympic Games rose to new heights in Amsterdam. The book tells the story of Olympic heroes like Paavo Nurmi, the legendary Finnish distance runner, who claimed one more gold medal in 1928 to take his personal total to nine from three Olympics; and the Canadian sprinter Percy Williams, who claimed the title of world's fastest man with golds in both the 100- and 200-metres. Amsterdam also saw the triumph of triple-jumper Mikio Oda of Japan, who became the first gold medalist from Asia; and American double-gold swimmer Johnny Weismuller, who would go on to star in Hollywood as Tarzan the Ape Man.Following the Amsterdam Games, the focus turns to Lake Placid, N.Y., and the Winter Games of 1932. The book tells the story of athletes like American speed-skater Irving Jaffee, who lunged for gold in a thrilling photo finish in the 10,000-metres; Sonja Henie of Sweden, who would claim her second of three consecutive figure skating titles; and American Eddie Eagan, who would add a team gold in four-man bobsleigh to his gold in boxing won in the Antwerp Olympics 12 years earlier. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former President of the International Olympic Committee, called The Olympic Century, "The most comprehensive history of the Olympic games ever published".

Informations

• Publié par: Warwick Press Inc.
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781987944082
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT VOLUME 9
THE IX OLYMPIAD
AMSTERDAM 1928 LAKE PLACID 1932
by George Russell
W
Warwick Press Inc. Toronto
Copyright 1996 WSRP
The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.
Published by:
Warwick Press Inc., Toronto
www.olympicbooks.com
1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison
Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley
Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman
Art Director: Christopher M. Register
Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons
Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske
Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin
Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez
Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee
Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin
Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat
Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto
Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany
Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg
Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O Neil
Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters
Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)
Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).
International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)
International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Val ry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)
All rights reserved. No part of The Olympic Century book series may be copied, republished, stored in a retrieval system, or otherwise reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written consent of the IOC, the USOC, and WSRP.
eBook Conversion: eBook Partnership, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-987944-24-2 (24 Volume Series)
ISBN 978-1-987944-08-2 (Volume 9)
CONTENTS
I A THLETIC A RISTOCRACY
II T HE O UTSIDERS
III P RINCIPLES AND P RAGMATISM
IV A C ALM B EFORE THE S TORM
A PPENDIX
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P HOTO C REDITS
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
ATHLETIC ARISTOCRACY
AMSTERDAM 1928
David George Brownlow Cecil, Lord Burghley, heir presumptive to the Marquisate of Exeter and the hereditary court tide of Grand Almoner of Great Britain, hardly looked to be the scion of one of England s richest and most important families as he jogged up and down in a singlet and running shorts, a boyish figure loosening his lean muscles beneath a breezy, sunlit Amsterdam sky. Nor did the graduate of Eton, Switzerland s La Rosay School, and the Georgian magnificence of Magdalene College, Cambridge, look, at that moment on July 30, 1928, as if he would be an Olympic champion. As he prepared for the 400-meter hurdles final at the Games of the IX Olympiad, even his fellow countrymen, who considered him the best English hurdler of his generation, wondered if he were up to the task ahead. Whatever else he did in life, Burghley wasn t expected to win the gold medal at this event in Amsterdam.
His high brow, wavy blond hair, and firm jaw might have suited his profile for a coin of the realm, but six days earlier, Burghley had looked badly off form as he just managed to qualify for this, his best event. He finished in a dismal 57 seconds flat, 5 full seconds slower than the world record, and only good enough for third place in the heat. It was just enough to get him into the final, but far from his personal best of 54.2 seconds, set a year earlier, and it was much worse than the time of the man who had beaten him handily in the race, defending Olympic champion Morgan Taylor of the Illinois Athletic Club. At the U.S. Olympic trials weeks earlier, Morgan had blasted across the 10 hurdles spaced over 400 meters in 52 seconds flat, setting a world record. He was the man expected to win the event, just as he had done at Paris in 1924, and just as three other Americans had done before him. In fact, since the 400-meter hurdles was added to the Olympic program in 1900, only Americans had won it.
Below: David George Brownlow Cecil, Lord Burghley, Olympic Gold Medalist, Amsterdam 1928

This was tradition of a sort that a man like Burghley could easily understand. But Burghley, as his fellows often noted, was a most obstinate young man. The trait had no doubt often come in handy over the generations in a family that had helped to rule the stubborn British since the days of Good Queen Bess. The Cecils had been among the great aristocratic families of England for centuries, starting with William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was secretary of state and then lord treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. Dubbed by the Earl of Exeter the greatest, gravest and most esteemed Councilor that ever Your Majesty had, Queen Elizabeth s administrator had built the imposing family seat that the young British hurdler would one day inherit. Burghley House, a many turreted 240-room mansion in Tudor and Italianate style, was set on 27,000 gemlike acres near Stamford in leafy Lincolnshire, laid out by the famous landscape architect Capability Brown. The opulently carved rooms were hung with works by Paola Veronese, Thomas Gainsborough, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Portraits of Henry VII, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell looked down from the ornate paneling. Their countenances didn t smile upon second-class effort.
Below: David Cecil (in warm-up suit) takes a temporary seat next to his mother and sister during ACE Oxford versus Cambridge meet at Fenners, Cambridge, in 1926. Cecil would achieve legendary status as a runner for his alma mater a year later by running the Great Court.

Young David Cecil had been brought up not to run footraces like common village boys, but to ride glistening thoroughbred hunters across country to the thin blare of the hunt master s bugle and the baying of a pack of beagles. Like all British youths of his era and social class, however, David had taken a hand at virtually every sport, but it wasn t until he went up to Magdalene at Cambridge University that he showed his talent for hurdling, the unmounted human equivalent of the foxhunter s steeplechase. He won the university s high and low hurdles events three times running, became a champion of the British Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), and went to his first Olympic Games in Paris at the age of 19, where he was eliminated in the first round of the 110-meter hurdles.
Three years later, he became an athletic legend of another kind altogether, the type celebrated in boys books of the age and, nearly 60 years later, hailed erroneously in the 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire. On June 7, 1927, as the clock above the Great Court of Cambridge s Trinity College chimed out the noon hour, young Burghley sped in his running shorts around the flag-stoned walkway of the Court, finishing up where he began as the clock chimed out its next-to-last stroke. The elapsed time was 42.50 seconds. It made Cecil a sporting legend among the British elite.
Running the Great Court before the clock had finished striking 12-running the chimes, as it was known-had obsessed Cambridge men for decades, if not longer. (William Wordsworth was so charmed by the clock s two-tone chiming, that he had written of its male and female voice in his poetry.) It had last been done in the 1890s by an eminent Victorian named Sir Walter Borley Fletcher, when the clock took 5 seconds longer to toll 12 times. And even then, Fletcher had cut corners and sometimes run on the grass. Since then, hundreds of undergraduates, many of them clad in full evening dress and most of them semi drunk, had tried and failed at the feat, occasionally injuring themselves on a splintered bottle of claret in the process.
But in more than a quarter-century, only young David Cecil had done it without cutting corners and running only on the flags. And no one managed to do it again, not even Olympic miler Sebastian Coe, who made an attempt in 1988 as part of a fundraiser. Coe took 45.52 seconds to make the courtyard round; the clock itself couldn t be heard over the roar of the crowd cheering him on, but a check of a video recording found that he, too, had failed: The clock finished striking in 44.40 seconds.
Moviemakers could hardly be expected to overlook such a gloriously pointless effort, and they didn t. But in Chariots of Fire, the feat was attributed to the wrong man: Harold Abrahams, winner of the 100-meter dash at Paris 1924. David Cecil, by then the Marquess of Exeter, refused ever to see the film that erased him from college glory.
But in Amsterdam, Cambridge exploits weren t on Burghley s mind.
Below: David Cecil (No. 444) is first over the final barrier as athletes charge to the finish of the 400-meter hurdles. Amsterdam was the most successful of Cecil s three-Games career that started at Paris 1924 and ended at Los Angeles 1932. Cecil won gold in 1928 but failed to finish in medal position at the two other Games.

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