Bronze is the best medal

In the 50-kilometre walk at the 1948 Olympics, the gold and silver medallists were aged 28 and 33 respectively. The man who took bronze, Britain’s ‘Tebbs’ Lloyd-Johnson, was 48 years old. Still the oldest person ever to win an Olympic track and field medal, Tebbs is now more famous than the men who finished ahead of him.

Another British bronze at those 1948 London Olympics was also worth more than most gold medals. Just three years previously when released from forced labour in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, weightlifter Jim Halliday had weighed a skeletal six stone (38 kg). Restoring his strength by eating eggs (including the shells which, he maintained, contained more calcium), Halliday shovelled coal all day at Kearsley Power Station, before training at home: ‘Unfortunately the bar was 6 foot 11 inches long and the widest part of the room was 7 foot 1 inch… The bar had to go straight up and straight down.’