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The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ – must rank as a paradigm example of a precept more honoured in the breach than the observance. It is rivalled only by his anticipation that the Games would be ‘a vehicle for increasing friendly understanding among nations’.
In an elegant series of vignettes entitled Aux Armes! Sport and the French: An English Perspective (Fairfield Books, £9.99), the sports writer David Owen notes that as early as 1900 the French authorities saw the Games as ‘a competitive fulcrum in which to stress test new, potentially strategic, technologies: shooting, motor vehicles and balloons’. Lord Desborough, rightly rescued from the oubliette of history by Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams in Titan of the Thames: The Life of Lord Desborough (Unbound, £25), organised the first London Olympics in 1908. They were marred by various nations taking umbrage at perceived slights even in the opening ceremony.
In Paris in 1924 there were outbreaks of nationalistic friction across a range of sports, including rugby, boxing, tennis, fencing and water polo, among both athletes and spectators, leading to a pessimistic headline in the Times: ‘Olympics doomed.’ By the time of the Berlin Games in 1936, no one could seriously credit the concept of a separation between politics and the Olympics.
A false glow was cast over the reality of sport by the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, loosely based on the Paris Olympics exactly a century ago. In Chariots Return: Saving the Soul of the Games (Keep It Real Publishing, £24), Mark Ryan uses the careers of the two British sprinter gold medallists, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, as a way to fast-forward the Olympic story, highlighting the abandonment of the Coubertin ideal of amateurism, of which Abrahams was a passionate aficionado but simultaneously a prophet of its demise, caused by the influx of money. The no-pay principle was only removed from the Olympic Charter in 1980. In Paris this summer, medal-winning track and field athletes will receive financial prizes too.
The difference between the old-fashioned amateur sportsman and the modern professional is well illustrated by comparing Lord Desborough with Iwan Thomas – the toff and the tough. The former was a fencing silver medallist and all-round sportsman, excelling in eclectic pursuits; the latter was also a silver medallist and a single-minded track specialist, who pushed himself into temporary depression, as he uncomfortably recounts in Brutal: My Autobiography (Bloomsbury Sport, £20). No more foxes, only hedgehogs.
In Amsterdam, in 1928, Paris’s forgotten third man of British athletics, Douglas Lowe, won the 800 metres for the second time. Those Games also saw women compete in athletics. The distress shown by some female competitors running the same distance as Lowe restricted their further participation in sprints until Tokyo 1964, though their cause was supported by Abrahams, whose wife later gave her name to an annual trophy for the best British woman athlete.
Curiously for an opponent of arbitrary discrimination, Abrahams led the fight against a British boycott of Hitler’s Olympics, arguing that it would do more harm than good. In The Other Olympians: A True Story of Gender, Fascism and the Making of Modern Sport (Ebury Press, £22), Michael Waters spurns the conventional analysis that those Games dealt a fatal blow to Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy because of the exploits of the black sprinter Jesse Owens – whom Abrahams later befriended. The author concentrates instead on the stories of two athletes, Zdenek Koubek, a Czech sprinter, and Mark Weston, a British thrower, both assigned as female at birth but later identified as biologically male. Neither competed in the Games, but the winner of the women’s 100 metres, the American Helen Stephens, was perceived as transgender. The dispute surrounding this disparate trio of athletes led to the introduction of the first Olympics sex tests, whose current version means that transgender persons will not compete in Paris this year, and intersex persons only under strict conditions.
As for doping (the principal cause of the distortion of a level playing field in sport), Abrahams denied not only its utility but its existence. Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the 100 metres at Seoul in 1988, but took the downward route from hero to zero in the space of 48 hours,was the subject of the most notorious Olympic scandal. Mary Ormsby’s valiant case for his defence in World’s Fastest Man: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson (Sutherland House Books, £21.99) cannot bypass the fact that Johnson’s steroid use was protracted and deliberate.
In pursuit of the crucial aim of fair competition, international governing bodies prescribe protective policies for elite athletes to deal not only with gender inequality and drugs but differences of weight, age and impairment. In Regulating Bodies: Elite Sport Policies and Their Unintended Consequences (OUP, £22.99), Jaime Schultz contends that such measures, if benign in aim, can have adverse effects.
Roger Bannister, the first sub-four-minute miler and medically trained neurologist, had a particular interest in such issues. Peter Whitfield’s Roger Bannister: Athlete and Philosopher (Wychwood Editions, £18), recalls that only his relative failure in the 1,500 metres in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics prompted him to extend his sporting career into 1954, his annus mirabilis. Bannister, while still a teenager, had declined an invitation to be part of Team GB in the 1948 London Olympics, but as a spectator he speculated on whether the Games were ‘changing their nature. Was a new form of professionalism creeping in, with the athlete maintained by his country for the purposes of prestige? Might not the Olympics accentuate the political struggle between different nations?’ But he perceptively ended his soliloquy: ‘At the beginning of each Games, such questions are raised. Then they are forgotten as the moving drama of success and failure unrolls itself.’
Nothing in this collection of unorthodox Olympics books casts doubt on the sportsman-savant’s conclusion. The medallists this year will vindicate the first three themes of the Olympic motto – plus vite, plus haut, plus fort – even if the fourth (ensemble) may remain aspirational. From Paris 1900, a five-month extravaganza where the core hallmark sports were complemented by peripheral outliers such as polo and pelota, to Paris 2024, where the equivalent outliers will be skateboarding and breakdance, in terms of the sporting agenda one may say: Chacun à son goût. In terms of the overall Olympic balance sheet the apt apophthegm would surely be: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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