A sporting life

If you wanted a little more excitement in this year’s Olympic marathon, you could do worse than imitate the race in 1908 — the first time the Games were held in ­London.

Competitors, running from Windsor Castle to Shepherd’s Bush in the boiling heat,  were given hot and cold Oxo, rice pudding and milk, but no water. Still, there was free eau de cologne and champagne — that’s what did for the South African leading at the halfway mark. He suffered stomach cramps after a glass of champagne, surrendering the lead to a plucky little Italian confectioner, Dorando Pietri. Just short of the finishing line, Pietri collapsed. In the most dramatic image of the Games, he was helped over the finishing line by officials, only to be disqualified after an American protest.

The Games were an odd mix of quaint amateurishness and bad blood between the Americans and the British. In the tug-of-war, the Americans were incensed that they had to wear normal shoes, while a British team of Liverpool policemen wore their regulation heavy boots. When the police won, the Americans lodged a formal protest, refusing a rematch in their stockinged feet. 

In the 400m, the Americans were outraged that their winner was disqualified for elbowing our man, Lieutenant Wyndham Halswelle. Even the opening ceremony was marred when the organisers forgot to include an American flag among those decorating the stadium. In revenge, the American athletes refused to dip the Stars and Stripes before Edward VII. And it wasn’t just the British the Americans took against — they even tried to block the track for their own man, John Taylor, the first black American to win Olympic gold.

Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on the man who arranged the Games, Lord Desborough — as a new exhibition at his French Gothic pile, Taplow Court, high above the Thames, shows.