The Olympics 60 years ago....

[betsybug]

from History Today:

Opening of the London Olympics
July 29th, 1948

The sun blazed down on Wembley Stadium in London on Thursday, July 29th, 1948, when the fourteenth games of the modern Olympiad were formerly opened by George VI in the presence of a host of dignitaries and a crowd of more than 80,000 people. The King, in naval uniform, was accompanied by the Queen and Princess Margaret. Lord and Lady Mountbatten were there, as were the Shah of Iran and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie. The members of the International Olympic Committee paraded on the turf in top hats. The games had attracted some 6,000 competitors from countries ranging through the alphabet from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. The Germans and the Japanese were not invited and the Soviet Union stayed away. The Olympics of 1944 would have been held in Britain, but had been cancelled because of the Second World War, and there was a certain appropriateness in the fact that the 1948 games in London were the successors to the notorious 1936 event in Berlin, which had been employed for Nazi propaganda by the German regime.

The competitors marched round the arena, with the smallest teams – one competitor from Malta and two from Singapore – receiving particularly warm applause before the King was formally invited to open the games by Lord Burghley, himself an Olympic gold medallist (in the 400 metres hurdles in 1928 ).

 

[betsybug]

Also....


When the Games Came to London in 1948
Janie Hampton
Aurum Press 380pp £18.99
ISBN 1 845 13334 X

The 1948 Olympics cost £732,268 to stage, less than £20 million in 2008 money. The current estimate for the 2012 games is £10 billion.

Janie Hampton’s new book wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of postwar Britain, with rationing in full swing. British competitors received special food rations but the main advantage of competing at a time when an adult could buy a shirt or blouse only once every 20 months was a free uniform: jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, plimsolls (no trainers) and hat, all off-ration. The French report on the Games devoted 12 of its 14 pages to the inadequacies of the food for their athletes and the difficulties in securing duty-free entry for their supplies of Mouton-Rothschild Claret. Other signs of the times include the construction of Wembley’s Olympic Way by some German prisoners of war and the sponsorship of the games by Craven A cigarettes.

We meet familiar names in unfamiliar circumstances. As the opening ceremony started the British team was alarmed to discover that it had no Union Flag. A young medical student who was acting as an assistant to an official was despatched to retrieve one from a distant car. Fortunately he could run fast: his name was Roger Bannister. The British amateur football team reached the semi-final where they were knocked out by the flagrantly professional Yugoslavs. The team manager was Matt Busby who handed round cigarettes (Craven A of course) at his team talk. Harold ‘Chariots of Fire’ Abrahams was treasurer of the organizing committee and Kenneth ‘they think it’s all over’ Wolstenholme was considered a promising football commentator.

The book gives an account of the highlights of each of the main events and tells us that ‘gender checking’ was introduced in 1948. One hopes that Fanny Blankers-Koen, winner of four golds, was exempted from the process, which involved a doctor ‘looking into the underpants of competitors to check for sexual abnormalities’, since she had borne two children. Britain’s greatest hero was surely Jim Halliday, who won a bronze in weightlifting, having emerged from a spell as a Japanese POW in 1945 weighing four stone.

Perhaps the best verdict on the 1948 Games was that of the great Emil Zatopek who lapped all the other competitors in the 10,000 metres and who declared that the Games were ‘the sun finally coming out after the war’. The Games yielded a profit of £29,420 – a figure unlikely to be exceeded in 2012. A fine account which places in context the orgy of cash, angst and celebration which we can confidently anticipate in 2008 and 2012.

 

[fgl]

The Olympics 2000 years ago:

The athletes all competed in the NUDE!

 

[betsybug]

^ Nowadays cannot lah. Why? Because all those dangly bits have a lot of wind/water resistance - how to break world records like that?

 

[hatecrew]

The Olympics 2000 years ago:

The athletes all competed in the NUDE!

and all of them were NAKED DUDES

 

[fgl]

fEMALES HAD TO COMPETE SEPERATELY and bared only one breast while keepingthe other covered in a tunic ...GO FIGURE?????
THE WOMEN: WERE THE ANCIENT OLYMPICS JUST FOR MEN?

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Along with the athletic contests held at ancient Olympia, there was a separate festival in honor of Hera (the wife of Zeus). This festival included foot races for unmarried girls. Although it is not known how old the festival was, it may have been almost as old as the festival for boys and men.

Little is known about this festival other than what Pausanias, a 2nd century AD Greek traveler, tells us. He mentions it in his description of the Temple of Hera in the Sanctuary of Zeus (model, courtesy of British Museum, shown above and plan shown below), and says that it was organized and supervised by a committee of 16 women from the cities of Elis. The festival took place every four years, when a new peplos was woven and presented to Hera inside her temple.

[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

Plan of the Sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia in the 5th century BC showing the Temple of Hera, the Hera Altar, and the stadion. (Plan from H. V. Herrmann, Olympia, Heiligtum und Wettkampfstatte, fig. 111.)

[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

Pausanias gives us a description of a girl's attire for the Hera games of the 2nd century AD. The girls wore their hair free down their back and a tunic hanging almost as low as the knees covering only the left shoulder and breast. The costume that Pausanias describes may have been the traditional costume at Olympia and possibly elsewhere for centuries.

Unmarried girls had a number of advantages at Olympia. They not only had their own athletic contests of the Hera festival in which to participate, but they were also allowed to watch the men's and boys' contests of the festival of Zeus. Married women, on the other hand, were not allowed to participate in the athletic contests of the Hera festival, and were barred on penalty of death from the Sanctuary of Zeus on the days of the athletic competition for boys and men. We don't know whether or not the women allowed the men to watch the girls' contests![/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

[/FONT]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The lady is a champ...

[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Attic Red Figure Amphora, ca. 490 BC. A winged Nike (goddess of victory) hovers above the ground, holding a flowering tendril and a smoking censer. The shape of the amphora is similar to those awarded to victorious athletes in the Panathenaic Games at Athens and therefore may have been a victory prize. University of Pennsylvania Museum Object ID 31-36-11.[/FONT]

 

[shinobi]

equestrian at olympics 2000 years ago: participant must be naked but horse must wear clothes