Bigger and better than ever before

By John Rennie

26 July 2010

The official countdown has started. With exactly two years to the opening ceremony, digital clocks all over the internet are ticking off the seconds to biggest ever festival of sport in Britain.

On July 27, 2012, the East End of London will become the 30th Olympics for two-and-a-half weeks.

Of course, it’s all happened before, but things were different then. A total of 216 countries will take part in London 2012, up from 204 at Beijing in 2008, and somewhere around 12,000 athletes. Then there is the Paralympic Games, which in Beijing totalled 148 nations with more than 4,200 competitors.

Rewind to the Fourth Modern Olympiad in 1908 and things were much smaller. But the significance of those London Games was that they saw the modern Olympics find their feet. Baron de Coubertin had organised a successful first Olympiad in Athens in 1896, but Paris 1900 had seen a fall-off in competitors. The amalgamation of the Games with the World Fair caused confusion as to which events genuinely were Olympic ones.

In St Louis in 1904, things got worse. Few athletes could fly to Missouri to compete, and over the months of competition, medals were handed out like confetti. Schoolboys walked off with golds as did the United States roque team – unsurprising, as there were the only nation competing in the sport. Again, the Games played second fiddle to the World Fair.

In 1908, with 20 nations taking part (up from 12 at St Louis), London did a far better job of the Olympics, though there were plenty of mistakes. All the officials were English – and there were justified moans about partiality at times.

Nationalism was played up, with the teams walking into the stadium behind their country’s flag for the first time; yet London managed to offend Sweden and the US by neglecting to hang their flags at the White City stadium.

The Irish team, their country fighting for independence from Britain, refused to appear at all. And it took some pressure before the London committee agreed to go from imperial to metric, changing the 100 yards dash to the 100 metres at the last moment.

The distance of the modern marathon was established at these Games. The race had to end at White City, of course. To allow it to begin in the sight of the king and queen at Windsor Castle, the distance was raised to 26 miles, then tweaked again at the request of Princess Mary to start beneath the windows of the royal nursery. Thus was the peculiar distance of 26 miles and 385 yards established.

But from that point the modern Olympics went from strength to strength – with world wars the only interruption. Berlin 1916 was cancelled as was Tokyo in 1940, with

London 1944 being postponed until 1948. Germany and Japan, recently defeated, were not invited to take part, but a record 59 nations were represented by 4,104 athletes.

These were the Austerity Games. Stories abound of the British team having to bring their own sandwiches, though the athletes were given increased rations (equal to those of dockers and miners) of 5,467 calories a day instead of the normal 2,600. No new venues were built – battered Britain simply had no money, and the athletes were housed in redundant army barracks.

As for the British team, they could only manage 12th in the table, with three golds. Winning isn’t everything, of course – as one British veteran of those Games wrote to The Times a couple of years back: “I did not do particularly well, but in those days it did not matter. My contemporaries and I had much more fun and a greater sense of achievement than modern athletes do.”

Those post-war London Olympics, stitched and cobbled together from leftovers as they were, had one other impressive first – ‘a legacy’, it would be called today. In 1948 Sir Ludwig Guttman, a neurologist working with World War II veterans with spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, began using sport as rehab. He set up a competition with other hospitals to coincide with the London Games. Over the next decade Guttman’s care plan caught on and when, in 1960, the Olympics were held in Rome, Guttmann brought 400 wheelchair athletes to compete. The modern Parallel Olympics (or Paralympics) were born.

And they go from strength to strength. At London 1908 there were 2,200 competitors; the 2012 Paralympics will boast around 4,500.

Of course, everything is bigger now. Stratford’s Olympic stadium, aquatics centre, hockey centre, basketball and handball arenas, velopark and Olympic Village sit at the heart of 500 acres of redeveloped east London – the aerial view is breathtaking.

This shiny new cathedral to sport isn’t without its critics, and there have been casualties along the way. The Manor Garden allotments at Hackney Wick will be put back in place after the Games have gone, while the Clays Lane housing estate cannot, and countless small businesses have been uprooted.

And many people liked the Lea Valley, scruffy and post-industrial as it was, in its pre-Olympic state. But, after the two-and-a-half weeks of glorious sporting mayhem is over – hopefully with Team GB clutching a medal haul even greater than the 47 shiny discs of Beijing 2008 – the Lea Valley will have a legacy to see it through the rest of this century and beyond.

That legacy, carved in stone by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2007, promises five things: to make the UK a world-leading sporting nation; to transform the heart of east London; to inspire a generation of young people to take part in local volunteering, cultural and physical activity; to make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living; and to demonstrate that the UK is a creative, inclusive and welcoming place to live in, visit and for business.

Even stripping out the political rhetoric they are aims nobody could take issue with. So keep watching that clock.