VII Olympiad

Ellen Phillips

Description

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Europe was devastated and exhausted from years of destruction and death. The VII Olympiad, the seventh volume in The Olympic Century series, begins with the story of how the Antwerp Games of 1920 used sport to bind the wounds war and restore hope for the future of mankind.Belgium suffered more than most countries during World War I, which ended in 1918, and the devastation was still clearly evident by 1920. But the book recounts how the determined Belgians came together to overcome the massive challenge of staging the Games, constructing a new Olympic stadium in less than a year. The heroes of Antwerp are featured: Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, who staked his claim as the greatest distance runner of the age with three golds; the marksman Oscar Swahn of Sweden who became, and remains, the oldest gold medal winner at age 72; and the great swordsman Nedo Nadi of Italy, the only athlete to win gold in all three fencing disciplines at one Olympics.The book then turns its attention to the French resort town of Chamonix and the first Winter Olympic Games in 1924. It tells the story of a charming 11-year-old figure skater from Sweden named Sonja Henie who, while finishing last in Chamonix, would go on to win three successive Olympic golds.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: 9781987944068
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

THE OLYMPIC CENTURY THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT VOLUME 7
THE VII OLYMPIAD
ANTWERP 1920 CHAMONIX 1924
by Ellen Phillips
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 (Series) 978-1-987944-24-2
ISBN (Volume 7) 978-1-987944-06-8
CONTENTS
I Studies in Sepia
II The Star System
III The Baron Beleaguered
IV Auspicious Beginnings
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
Bibliography
Index

STUDIES IN SEPIA
ANTWERP 1920
Every Olympic Games is a tapestry of the human condition as it was at a certain point in time. The competition s records and statistics, its posters and medals and souvenirs, its photographs and films form the surface pattern. Hidden within it is the foundation, another image entirely, dense with what was past or passing or to come.
The surface image of the Antwerp Games of 1920, so long ago and yet so modern, is made of fading photographs, and these conceal as much as they reveal. Among them is a picture of American athletes, leaving New Jersey for European triumphs. Anyone of the pictures might have been made at almost any time during the 20 years before. There in sepia is the 19th-century Hoboken pier, with an old-fashioned steamship moored beside it; she is called the Princess Matoika, and she is festooned with banners that spell out United States Olympic Team. There are the athletes, golden youths all. For the most part, they wear dark wool trousers and matching jackets, and on their heads are the jaunty straw hats fashionable early in the century. The very few women have straw hats as well, and except for two little girls still in short dresses, their skirts reach demurely to their ankles, as propriety dictates.
Strong-eyed, fine-limbed, bright with their tomorrows, the men and women in the photograph wave eternally from gangplank and railing. Below on the pier, a crowd waves back and cheers, and the brass of a military band gleams forever in the late afternoon sun.
What distinguished this departure from all those that preceded it were the 1,800 young passengers just disembarked from the Princess Matoika. They were aligned in formation on the pier, not quite in camera range. Riddled with shot and shrapnel, eyeless or limbless or headless, they drew no dividends from their tomorrows. Row on row they lay dead in their coffins, awaiting the soldiers who would escort them along the roads to cities and towns and hamlets across America, to the folded flags and dying bugle calls that signaled journey s end at last in the enfolding earth of home. The unseen travelers were among the more than 50,000 dead of the American Expeditionary Force who fought in the First World War and whose bodies were carefully found and brought home from Europe by the War Department because their families asked to bury them. Nineteen thousand more families agreed with Theodore Roosevelt, who turned to Ecclesiastes when his son Quentin perished and said, In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be. Their bodies remained under rows of white crosses, in graveyards in the Argonne, at Belleau Wood, and by the Somme.
Grim as the figures were, America, which entered the war only in its last year, emerged relatively unscathed. In Europe, 8.5 million soldiers died. An entire generation of young men fell in a war that was expected to last a few months and ground on for four merciless years, a conflict more terrible than any but the most prescient imagined.
When the guns of this war fell silent in 1918, the world had changed completely. The catastrophe released forces that had been gathering for decades, forces that would destroy economies, reshape nations, alter the balances of international power, and transform the beliefs and social structures that governed the way men and women lived their lives. For the survivors and heirs of Europe s murdered generation, the future was an unknown country. Things would be different there.
International sport, as always, swayed in international currents. The 1916 Games of the VI Olympiad, scheduled for Berlin, were never held because of the war. In neutral Lausanne, where he had moved Olympic headquarters, the movement s founding father, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, kept Olympism alive through the years of conflict and, from Armistice Day itself, urged the next Games into being. He meant them to be a celebration of peace and renewal, a demonstration of the international amity that sport could provide, and a promise that life would go on as before.
But sport, like everything else, was in the midst of change. The Games were evolving. The characteristics that define sporting competition as it is today--something rather different from the original Olympic ideals-were already emerging in 1920, although not everyone recognized them, and among those who did, not everyone approved.
Some changes seemed to be continuations. Among them were emblems and ceremonials that symbolized Coubertin s philosophy. The Olympic flag, with its five interlocking rings signifying international peace, made its first official appearance at these Games. So did the Olympic oath, affirmation of Coubertin s vision of individual, amateur sportsmanship.
The international sporting establishment, however, growing ever larger and more unwieldy, was still sorting out the roles and authority of its different governing bodies, and its conflicts touched every area of competition, from the mechanics of staging the Games to the sports that were played and the athletes who played them. According to Coubertin, for instance, the Olympic movement was above politics, and its Games were a tool to help reconcile national differences. Yet the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Antwerp as host for the 1920 Games to celebrate Belgium s heroic role in the just-ended war. And the Belgian organizers, with the approval of the IOC, excluded the war s defeated aggressors-the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey from the celebration.
As for the questions of which athletes and which sports were appropriate to the movement, the events of 1920 and the years that followed showed that the Games were beginning to take the form they now have. Women, for instance, had occasionally competed in early Games in such genteel sports as archery and golf, but Coubertin thought public competition for them unattractive and vulgar, and only at Stockholm 1912 were the first swimming competitions scheduled for them. The American sports establishment, ruled by an archconservative, sent no women to Stockholm. But 15 American women were on the Antwerp 1920 team. Then there was the question of the place of winter sports in the movement. Some, such as figure skating, were included in various summer Games, including Antwerp s. But pressure for a winter festival was growing. The first would be held four years later, at Chamonix.
And there was the issue that dogged the movement for most of its history. Were the Games a meeting of amateur sportsmen competing for the glory and joy of sport as a manifestation of all around human excellence, or were they a form of entertainment, whose best performances would come from paid professionals? Then, as in several decades that followed, the rules seemed clear: The Games were competitions for amateurs.
Below: Rows of coffins filled with A