The 1948 Olympics

". Yes. The Games that everyone remembers as the political Games were the Nazi ones in 1936 when Hitler turned them into a propaganda celebration. One of the unfortunate features of these Games is that, in a way, Hitler was celebrating some of the Olympic ideals, such as physical prowess, but then went on to twist them for his own political ends. After World War II there was this real concern that the Olympic movement had to rescue itself from being exploited by politicians in this way. So the London Games were designed to be the polar opposite of what had taken place in 1936 – they were to be low key, non-political and friendly. This also meant really focusing on the sport, rather than the celebration of the human body. The general response to the results at the time was embarrassment and one of the real anxieties was that it was not just a reflection of Britain’s decline as a world power, but that the British people were malnourished, which in some respects they were. Never mind the 1908 complaints that the Americans had been training, now there was a sense that the British needed a bit more building up and training. That said, there were other people who thought the British performance was perfectly fine, that it was very British and nothing like the Berlin Games, which were all about celebrating German success and prowess. Somehow it was all right if the British did badly, because that was part of the new rescued Games, which weren’t about jingoism and national bombast. There’s this great story that the British Olympic Minister Philip Noel-Baker liked to tell of someone who went to the Berlin Games, who said by the end of them he was absolutely sick of hearing Deutschland über alles being played everywhere, and the great thing about the London Games was that you hardly heard “God Save the Queen” at all because British athletes didn’t win. He initially thought the Olympics were ridiculous, but then he noticed their propaganda value and decided to send a Soviet team to Helsinki 1952, where they did very well. It was probably the most politically dangerous year that any Olympics have ever taken place in. These were really fraught times. It was the beginning of the Cold War and the Berlin blockade was going on while the Games were taking place – an emergency debate in the House of Commons coincided with the opening ceremony. But the whole point of the 1948 London Olympics was to somehow be insulated from all of that. It was to present this “Keep Calm and Carry On” spirit. This is what it was meant to symbolise and it did it very successfully. It’s worth reading this book just for the details about how austere the 1948 Games were. My favourite is that the British Olympic Association couldn’t afford to provide free towels, so the athletes had to rent them by the day. You just have to think about that in the context of 2012 – I would love to see the faces of the American team if they were told that they had to rent their towels in the Olympic village. There was just no money at all in 1948. In all sorts of different ways, what we call austerity now doesn’t compare with past austerities."