The Olympic Games

"When I was growing up this book, first published in 1976, was a really excellent encyclopaedia of the Olympics. It goes right up to Munich 1972 and it tells the history of the first 90-odd years of the Olympic movement. It has a summary of every single Olympic Games. It even has an article by Prince Philip about equestrian events, because Prince Philip was, at that time, the head of the International Equestrian Federation. “It’s taken a long time for people to actually research the Olympics properly” For many of us, this was the first introduction that we had to serious books about the Olympics. It is brilliantly illustrated. And, for me, a lot of the pictures came to life when I watched the films and documentaries on the TV. It was as if the book had come to life. It’s a seminal book in getting you up to speed with the history of the games in one volume. The authors did a magnificent job. It’s still something that I’ll consult to this day. He was president, 1972-1980. John Rodda was a very distinguished Guardian journalist who, in 1968, had attended the student protests in Mexico before the Olympics of that year. He was actually there when the security forces moved in and the shooting started. It’s one of the great forgotten things, the massacre at the Square of the Three Cultures in Mexico City just before the Olympics. It’s reckoned that at the very least, about 300 people were murdered there by the government forces. Rodda covered the Olympics right up to his death. He died before London 2012, but he was one of the grandees of Olympic journalism. Rodda and Killanin catalogue the great Olympic figures. It’s taken a long time for people to actually research the Olympics properly. The organization I belong to, the International Society of Olympic Historians, has done its bit. There is still a lot of work to do in finding out and verifying the facts, because over the years mistakes have crept in and the documentation in the early years wasn’t as good as it could have been. Historians have gone back to newspapers and found that some of the results were actually incorrect. Over the years things have changed, too, like the spellings of names—that sort of thing. There’s been a lot of work since, but this book pulled everything on the Olympics together for the very first time. It is written for intelligent adults, but it’s accessible to people and, of course, the illustrations help that."