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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.
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