For Michèle and Max, Gavin and Ygraine
Copyright © David Miller, 2003
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First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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Mo Farah © IOC/Huet
Usain Bolt © IOC/Evans
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Part II: The Post-War Years (1948–1980)
Chapter XXVI Post-War Austerity (J. Sigfrid Edström)
Chapter XXVII St Moritz (V) 1948 (Åke Seyffarth)
Chapter XXVIII London (XIV) 1948 (Fanny Blankers-Koen)
Chapter XXIX Enter the Soviets (Vitaly Smirnov)
Chapter XXX Oslo (VI) 1952 (Jeanette Altwegg)
Chapter XXXI Helsinki (XV) 1952 (Emil Zátopek)
Chapter XXXII Wayward Fanaticist (Avery Brundage)
Chapter XXXIII Cortina D’Ampezzo (VII) 1956 (Anton Sailer)
Chapter XXXIV Melbourne (XVI) 1956 (Al Oerter)
Chapter XXXV Arrival of Television (Kevan Gosper)
Chapter XXXVI Squaw Valley (VIII) 1960 (Heidi Biebl)
Chapter XXXVII Rome (XVII) 1960 (Herb Elliott)
Chapter XXXVIII Anti-Apartheid Flame (Sam Ramsamy)
Chapter XXXIX Innsbruck (IX) 1964 (Eugenio Monti)
Chapter XL Tokyo (XVIII) 1964 (Billy Mills)
Chapter XLI Reformist’s Advent (Juan Antonio Samaranch)
Chapter XLII Grenoble (X) 1968 (Jean-Claude Killy)
Chapter XLIII Mexico City (XIX) 1968 (Kip Keino)
Chapter XLIV Terror (Thomas Bach)
Chapter XLV Sapporo (XI) 1972 (Ard Schenk)
Chapter XLVI Munich (XX) 1972 (Ulrike Meyfarth)
Chapter XLVII Tormented Lord (Richard Pound)
Chapter XLVIII Innsbruck (XII) 1976 (Franz Klammer)
Chapter XLIX Montreal (XXI) 1976 (Lasse Virén)
Chapter L Cold War, Hot Heads (Lord Killanin)
Chapter LI Lake Placid (XIII) 1980 (Ingemar Stenmark)
Chapter LII Moscow (XXII) 1980 (Sebastian Coe)
The provenance of this publication was an invitation in 1997 from Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to 2001, to write an ‘everyman’s’ history of the IOC. So much of their responsibility remains outside regular news coverage that the President wished for the public to be better informed. During his Presidency, I accompanied Samaranch on a sequence of four tours to twenty-seven outpost nations of the Olympic Movement – twelve National Olympic Committees across central Africa in eleven days; to the Far East including Nepal and Guam; to Pacific islands including Micronesia, just devastated by a hurricane; and to Central Asian nations of the former Soviet Republic. They were often difficult, wearisome journeys, with no tangible reward or prestige for the President other than to bring personal contact from headquarters to distant, sometimes poor, under-funded peoples whose participating spirit nonetheless burns bright through the inspiration of the Olympic flame. At the same time, I felt that a history should include, related in parallel, the events which are the sole reason for the IOC’s own creation: the Games and the heroes great and small.
There have been two previous conventional editions of this history, coinciding with the Games of Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008. The original intention, a Millennium launch at the time of Sydney 2000, had to be postponed on account of uncertainty following the IOC’s crisis of 1999, in the shadow of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. Each subsequent four years, the text has been updated with four new chapters, embracing the immediately previous Summer and Winter Games. For the first time this third edition, for London 2012, is simultaneously published in e-book format in three volumes:
Part I – 1894–1936, covering the first ten Summer Games and four Winter Games, from early near-disasters and including entrenched antipathy towards female competitors under the influence of the first three Presidents, yet steadily growing towards global acclaim.
Part II – 1948–1980, post-Second World War, through the period of financial and Cold War anxieties, and the continuing profound ideological amateur–professional conflict.
Part III – 1984–2012, with a simultaneous expansion of billion-dollar television and sponsorship contracts alongside mounting defamation by drug cheats and the near catastrophic crisis of 1999.
I have been grateful for the continuing enthusiasm for this history of IOC President Jacques Rogge. While my opinions are not necessarily those of the Executive Board, I hope to have reflected accurately the symbiosis of administrators and athletes. I am additionally grateful to The Princess Royal for her Foreword on the occasion of Britain’s third hosting of the world’s most observed sporting event.
Given the responsibility, as Senior Vice-President, of holding together in wartime the frayed threads of the IOC, upon the death of President de Baillet-Latour in 1942 Sigfrid Edström, briefly, and his successors Avery Brundage (USA, 1952–72), Lord Killanin (Ireland, 1972–80) and Juan Antonio Samaranch (Spain, 1980–2001), had to wrestle with the mounting tide of professionalism that challenged the International Olympic Committee’s ideology. This had existed, and progressively become more apparent, since the 1920s, when payment was already clandestinely prevalent in track and field in Scandinavia. There had been disputes on ‘broken-time’ payment to competitors, compensation for absence from regular jobs, between the IOC and the international federations of football and tennis in the ’20s: the latter resulting in tennis remaining absent from the Games until 1988. There had also been the provocative decision by the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), supported by the IOC, to suspend the then most acclaimed of all athletes, Paavo Nurmi of Finland, from the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932.
By the ’50s, it was common knowledge in tennis, track and field, and in non-Olympic rugby, that top performers in many so-called amateur clubs were receiving improper payment at international events. With the advent of sponsored equipment (shoes) by Adidas and Puma in the ’60s, endorsement payments to track stars had become spectacular. Simultaneously, totalitarian states such as the USSR, Cuba and the whole of Eastern-bloc Europe were sending teams to the Games composed of full-time ‘civil servants’. Yet still the IOC clung to amateurism until, during Killanin’s presidency, the term ‘amateur’ was removed from the IOC’s Eligibility Rule, though professionalism would not finally be acknowledged and introduced until 1988 under the guidance of Samaranch. The watching public did not care one way or another – they just wanted to see the best. (They would be much more concerned and disillusioned by the promiscuity of drug involvement.)
The longstanding but increasingly hypocritical attitude of the IOC on old-fashioned amateurism, upheld notably by older officials in America and Britain, had effectively been ignored, undercover, by much of the rest of the sporting world since the end of the First World War. Samaranch’s pragmatism was part of a growing trend, in which international sport administration had been overtaken by Italians, Spanish, Latin-Americans and Asians. While Britain continued to behave in the style of traditionalists, by the ’70s others elsewhere were forging ahead in the commercial game, on and off the field, whatever the protestations of Brundage and Lord Exeter of Britain, president of IAAF and IOC Vice-President. The new world was personified by João Havelange, Brazilian president of FIFA, and also later by Primo Nebiolo of Italy, in athletics. Even moderates such as Raymond Gafner of Switzerland were persuaded to fall in line with Samaranch. As Gafner said:
I could not accept that the IOC should teach young people that hypocrisy was the first qualification of sport: that if you were not caught [on payments] you were not guilty. The same happened subsequently with drugs. Certainly some athletes are paid too much, but if competitors are giving all their time to sport, that does not disturb me … without money, the IOC cannot exist. Having the money is not the problem. The question is whether you are serving sport or using sport.
The concept of opening the door to the professionalism of the capitalist West alongside state-orientated pseudo-amateur Communist regimes would directly shape Samaranch’s subsequent revolution. Yet while he wanted to ensure that the Olympic Games presented to the public the best that the world had to offer, making competition fair to the participants and legitimising their contrasting status, Samaranch also attempted to rationalise relations between the three constituent arms of the Olympic Movement – IOC, national Olympic committees and international federations. A contradiction of the Games is that, although they are owned by the IOC, on the day that competition begins the responsibility for the running of events rests with the IFs, which administer individual sports, and with NOCs, who provide the ammunition (competitors). The dispensable body, arguably, is the IOC itself. ‘The IOC is in theory very weak,’ Samaranch said. ‘We are only part of the Olympic Movement. That is why it is essential to achieve a unity of the three arms.’
The unity he achieved – a voluntary amalgamation held together in the late twentieth century more by money than by ideals – had a continuing fragility which Dr Jacques Rogge, the new incumbent as President in 2001, would find no easier to handle than his predecessors.
On the one hand, the IOC is a paternal oligarchy dispensing a vast income, partially to the host city, whereas the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) and the two collective organisations of summer and winter federations – the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) and the Association of International Olympic Winter Sports Federations (AIOWF), all of them instituted under Samaranch’s regime – were democratically based yet without executive power: other than if any of their members were coincidentally elected to the IOC. With the huge funds that had poured into IOC coffers from the time of the Munich Games of 1972, initially from television contracts and later also from global sponsorship, the triangle of bodies creating Olympic Games were engaged in a gentlemanly cockfight for distribution of funds, subterranean plots sometimes less than polite. Brundage, throughout his 20 years as President, railed against both NOCs and IFs, attempting to deny that they deserved proper administrative recognition within the Olympic Movement. Killanin, serving for eight years, tentatively acknowledged the problem when creating a Tripartite Commission: no more than a talking shop. Samaranch went the whole hog, yet in doing so inadvertently undermined the original concept of the IOC as a private club.
As the IOC’s affairs became evermore public, and its income evermore enviable, the tensions within the Olympic Movement inexorably rose. By the time of Samaranch’s second administrative revolution – necessitated by the Salt Lake City scandal and with the formation of Commission 2000, which inaugurated constitutional election to the IOC of 15 ex-officio members each from NOCs, IFs and athletes – the concept of a private club no longer existed. Many of those 45 would now have independent agendas that were not necessarily in the better interest of the IOC, on whose behalf they were supposed to act.
Samaranch realised that any multinational company should have representation on the board of prime movers, even if that could occasionally generate an impasse in which members with private agendas resist change. For example, with the election to membership at the Session in 2007 of Patrick Baumann, secretary-general of international basketball, there were now five Swiss on the IOC, including Sepp Blatter (football), René Fasel (ice hockey), Gian-Franco Kasper (skiing) and Denis Oswald (rowing and president of ASOIF).
Morality is synonymous with Olympic conduct. Or ought to be. Brundage clung to the morality of a bygone era, of a privileged class failing to identify with contemporary youth. Chief Dan George, a Native American who was part of the threatened ethnic culture of his people of southern Alberta prior to the Calgary Winter Games of 1988, in his book My Spirit Soars, reflected on how the future would depend as much or more on the choices of youth than on the wisdom or otherwise of contemporary administrators: ‘There is a longing among all people to have a sense of purpose and worth. To satisfy that common longing in all of us, we must respect each other. Young people are the pioneers of new ways. Since they face too many temptations it will not be easy for them to know what is best.’ Many are conscious of this elusive truth. Nikolaos Nissiotis, professor of philosophy at Athens University in the mid twentieth century and president of the International Olympic Academy at Olympia, identified the values of the Games when addressing a gathering of NOCs in 1979:
The Games have satisfied the need of all people to meet at periodic intervals, free of the divisions of race, nationality, religion and politics; they have seen the progressive participation of more and more nations, especially the new nations of Africa, as independent and free people; they have encouraged the development of sport over the last 50 years to almost superhuman level, which gives them an indisputable grandeur, alongside the spirit that prevails in the Olympics; they have harnessed the technical progress in mass information, enabling the Games to reach millions who can enjoy them as though they were present.
Yet these achievements can inevitably be soured by a sense of triumphalism among the successful: as would be the disagreeable case, for example, when the United States, with a bucketful of medals in the absence of the Soviet Union and others through the boycott of the Los Angeles Games of 1984, took their team on a five-day national tour, giving children a distorted image of the relevance of participation. At a similar celebration in the wake of the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002, Randy Harvey, a respected commentator of Los Angeles Times, wrote: ‘We haven’t advanced that far through the Olympics in pursuit of a more perfect civilisation, but the important thing is that we have the vehicle that enables us to keep trying.’ He went on to say that it would be the concept of ideals, often unreached, or not even reached for, that would keep him coming back. The author has many such illustrations: Gabriele Andersen-Scheiss, Swiss marathon runner, wilfully staggering half insensible to the finish at LA; Guam’s first-ever Olympic competitor, Judd Bankert, finishing out of sight and unknown in the 10km biathlon in Calgary after mortgaging his house to be there; Martinho de Araujo, an East Timorese weightlifter who trained for Sydney with a bucket of concrete on each end of a pole; Glory Alozie of Nigeria, 100m hurdles silver medal winner at Sydney, persuaded by friends to run in memory of her fiancé who had been run down and killed three weeks earlier.
It can be said that for almost 30 years following the Second World War the IOC survived in spite of rather than because of its leadership. Brundage, dictatorially at the helm from 1952 to 1972, passionately battled to preserve the ideology of de Coubertin in the face of a changing world, to such a degree that by his last years, aged almost 80, he had become more an obstacle than an asset for survival. Succeeded by the genial, avuncular Killanin, the IOC took a step forward but remained hesitant.
Killanin was a perceptive bridge to a new era, yet as a ‘part-time’ President, basically resident in Dublin and committing Monique Berlioux, the Director-General in Lausanne, to control day-to-day affairs, he lacked the immediacy introduced by Samaranch, who instantly decided he must be resident at headquarters. Faced with the African boycott of 1976 and the Socialist boycott four years later, the gentlemanly Killanin was slow to counter the overriding political forces that manipulated an innocent IOC. He was a gracious if indecisive bridge between a fossilised past and an unstable future. It would require Samaranch’s almost unilateral resolution to secure the IOC’s long-term equilibrium.
‘The world has started to breathe more freely now that the war in Europe has ended. It is of course a catastrophe that hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed, historic buildings of inestimable value destroyed, irreplaceable monuments gone forever. Let us hope that through united efforts we can repair and rebuild a better world. Let us hope that in this vital job the Olympic Movement will also have an important role to fulfil for the benefit of humanity. May the Olympic flame, once again burning, help restore for future generations the hope and the happiness to live, and the will to work hard.
I well know that each of you will do his best to assist in this enormously valuable work for our Movement and I’m aware that all of you are awaiting advice on how this job should be done. I have therefore set up five points which, in my opinion, are important and which I recommend you begin as soon as possible:
Let me also inform you of the result of my proposal to install a second Vice-President. The majority of the votes forwarded to me have agreed and I have the honour and pleasure to inform you that I declare Mr Avery Brundage as the second Vice-President of the IOC.’ (A letter to members, June 1945)
(Photograph © IOC)
The Second World War made it impossible to stage any Olympic Games between 1936 and 1948. In spite of this inactivity, they were difficult years for the IOC: a period in which two IOC Presidents died and in which, but for the will-power of a veteran Swede, the cherished achievement of de Coubertin might almost have become a coincidental victim of the fray.
De Coubertin remained tenaciously loyal to his search for ethical human existence and in 1936, after negotiations with the IOC Executive Board, the City of Lausanne had agreed to finance an Olympic Museum, to which de Coubertin had left his artefacts, manuscripts and collections, other than a portion which were bequeathed to the International Olympic Institute directed by Carl Diem in Berlin. Lausanne also granted their most famous citizen the Freedom of the City in 1937. Besides assuming financial responsibility for the museum, the city had additionally responded to de Coubertin’s unpublicised but by now serious personal financial difficulties. He had given to the Olympic Movement not only a life’s work but also the backing of his private fortune and was now almost destitute. Francis Messerli, secretary of the Swiss NOC, suggested to other NOCs that they set up a fund in recognition of de Coubertin’s 50 years of work towards educational reform. His written documents ran to some 60,000 pages. Many NOCs, IFs, IOC members, governments and heads of state donated a total of over 50,000 Swiss francs to the ‘Pierre de Coubertin Fund’, the most substantial donations coming from the governments of Japan, Germany, Greece and Czechoslovakia, from FIFA and from the NOCs of Italy, Sweden and Brazil. So impoverished was de Coubertin that in 1936 he had had to relinquish even his small apartment in Lausanne, moving alone into lodgings in Geneva. He died from a heart attack on 2 September 1937, sitting on a bench while taking a walk in the Parc de la Grange. This was a month after his last act of public dedication to his cause: a message of support to the organisers of the first Asian Games, recommending them to familiarise all Asians with the notions of Olympism and Hellenism.
It was in recognition of a life’s work that 49 of his IOC colleagues had nominated him, during the Oslo Session of 1935, for the Nobel Peace Prize, dispatching their signatures to the Nobel Committee in Oslo. The Norwegian sports press had already proposed him for the prize seven years earlier, though he had declined the nomination, saying that only personalities who had fought politically for peace should be considered. He was never to receive the award, perhaps partially because the nomination was backed by Germany in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the prize being awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, an opponent of the Nazi regime who was interned in a concentration camp. It was strange that this altruistic paragon of educational reform should never have received public support in his native France, where he had more often encountered opposition than enthusiasm. Only after his death would the opportunist French seek to claim the freehold of his initiative and inspired magnanimity.
Few of those to whom he was a hero knew of his endurance of a blighted family life. He had married Marie Rothan in 1895 and for a while all was well until their first-born, Jacques, became retarded when suffering sunstroke as a baby after being left too long in the sun. A guilt-ridden Marie subsequently overwhelmed their daughter to the extent that she suffered an emotionally disturbed life. Devoting themselves additionally to the welfare of two nephews, Pierre and Marie were further distraught when both were killed at the front in the First World War; thus, with the event of his own death, ended centuries of the de Coubertin line. His grave is at the Bois de Vaux in Lausanne, close to the IOC’s headquarters, and, by decree of his will, his heart is buried at Olympia.
Shortly before his death, de Coubertin had written to von Tschammer, the Reichssportführer, requesting that he establish an Olympic Studies Centre to maintain and advance his educational work. In 1938, with government support, the International Olympic Institute was founded in Berlin, with Carl Diem, who had attended the entombment of de Coubertin’s heart, as director of his intellectual legacy. In the spring of 1939 the Greek parliament voted to create an Olympic Academy in Olympia but this intention would not be fulfilled until after the war.
Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour, IOC President, addresses mourners at Ancient Olympia (top), prior to the internment of de Coubertin’s heart, at the founder’s decree, by Crown Prince Paul of Greece (above). (both © IOC)
The founder would live to see neither that nor, indeed, a year after his death, the effective end of the women’s international sports movement, the FSFI. The IAAF, declaring itself the sole body responsible for women’s athletics, had called for the dissolution of the FSFI during its own congress at the time of the Berlin Games. The scheduled fifth World Women’s Games of 1938 in Vienna were cancelled, in their place being the first Women’s European Athletics Championships under the aegis of the IAAF. With the 200m, long jump and shot put being added to the women’s programme at the IOC Session in Cairo in 1938, the FSFI had become increasingly irrelevant.
In 1936 the respective Games of 1940 had been awarded to Tokyo and Sapporo in an innovative and romantic move to the Far East. With the arrival of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, the IOC requested confirmation of Japan’s intentions. The Japanese NOC delayed reply, while government preparation on 16 sites for the Games continued, but eventually the IOC was forced to switch venues to Helsinki and St Moritz. The decision regarding St Moritz was complicated by the refusal of the international ski federation, backed by the Swiss, to compete in Alpine events because of the IOC’s refusal to admit skiing instructors as amateurs. As a consequence, the IOC switched again, from St Moritz to Garmisch. Helsinki and Garmisch continued with respective preparations until November 1939 – two months after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September – and May 1940, the Finns having to withdraw following the eastern invasion by the Soviet Union.
Amid all this was the further complication of Hitler’s grandiose plan for a new world sports order, of permanent Olympic Games to be staged in Germany. For the return to Garmisch it had been proposed to stage a ‘skiing day’ with 10,000 participants, which would include a lengthy speech by Hitler in open breach of Olympic regulations. So in awe, seemingly, was de Baillet-Latour, the President, that he wrote to Diem, upon cancellation of the Games: ‘How sad it is to think that the wonderful work you have done to give the Vth Olympic Winter Games an even more impressive character than was the case in 1936 has now been in vain. The Skiing Day would have been an unforgettable experience for all those fortunate enough to be present.’ It defies belief that de Baillet-Latour and his colleagues should have thought it suitable to return without question to Garmisch in spite of Germany’s recent seizure of Bohemia and Moravia.
At the 1939 Session in London, the two Games for 1944 had been granted to London and Cortina, the other candidates being respectively Athens, Budapest, Helsinki and Lausanne, and St Moritz and Oslo. With the continuation of the war, these in turn had to be cancelled. As late as February 1942, Lord Aberdare wrote to Edström that ‘the extension [of the War] could make it difficult to organise the 1944 Games’, writing further in the autumn that the Games would not be possible ‘even if the War is over at the beginning of 1943’.
The cancellations avoided a continuing problem. At the Cairo Session in 1938, the conflict with the FIS over the eligibility of ski instructors had re-arisen, the Norwegian president of the FIS having threatened to resign if the IOC did not accept the FIS decision that instructors were eligible. Cruising down the Nile on a steamer, the IOC had had three options for the scheduled Games in Sapporo: abandon the Winter Games, postpone them until 1944, or stage them without skiing. The decision taken was to exclude skiing but, while this might possibly have been acceptable to the Japanese, the position was highly controversial if the Games were to be held in the Alpine resort of St Moritz. Initially, St Moritz organisers planned for skiing as a ‘demonstration sport’, then changed their minds. At the Session in London in 1939, the IOC stood on its dignity, reaffirming that they alone had the right to interpret the rules and decide on the programme, that a host organising committee should fulfil the approved programme. With the failure to reach agreement with St Moritz, the Games were duly switched to Garmisch but the problem would remain until after the war was ended. A compromise would be reached at the 1946 Session in Lausanne, unsatisfying though it was, that instructors were eligible so long as they received no payment after October 1946. Partial pregnancy was apparently acceptable.
The advent of war, and Germany’s occupation of the Low Countries, inevitably compromised de Baillet-Latour’s ability as a Belgian to maintain communications with IOC members. This was more easily done by Vice-President Edström, who was from neutral Sweden. The IOC was indeed fortunate that Edström, though nearly 70, was still energetic, for there were clear signs of German moves to usurp the IOC’s authority. In the winter of 1940–1, Diem, von Halt and von Tschammer visited de Baillet-Latour, ostensibly for reasons of social goodwill but actually to explain Hitler’s takeover plans for international sport. Diem even appeared at the IOC’s headquarters in Lausanne with the apparent intention of taking control shortly after de Baillet-Latour suffered a stroke in his sleep and died during the night of 6 January 1942. Diem’s appearance in Lausanne was foiled by the fact that Lydia Zanchi, the IOC secretary since 1927, kept essential documents locked in the cellar.
Madame Lydia Zanchi, secretary at the IOC office in Lausanne, thwarted an attempted German takeover during the Second World War by hiding essential documents in the cellar. (© IOC)
Though probably unrelated, de Baillet-Latour’s death occurred soon after hearing that his son had been killed in an air crash while training with Free Belgian Forces in the United States. The passing of the President committed Edström, now interim President, to extend his efforts in holding the organisation together. He did so, in spite of postal and cable communication difficulties, to the extent that members were in touch more frequently than some of the 73 had ever been beforehand. With some exceptions, he upheld a promise to send a circular of IOC and other news three to four times a year. This included, in January 1943, the news of the death of the last of the 13 founding members, Jiri Guth-Jarkovski of Czechoslovakia.
J. Sigfrid Edström was born in Gothenburg on 21 November 1870, educated there and in Zurich as a civil engineer, also becoming fluent in English, French and German, spoken and written, with some knowledge of Russian. He had been a useful sprinter, achieving 11 seconds for the 100m, and after attending the 1904 Games in St Louis he had devoted his spare time at home to sports administration, being founder of the national sports federation and vice-president of the 1912 Games in Stockholm. There he founded the IAAF, serving as its first president until he retired in 1946, when he was elected President of the IOC.
He had served on the IOC Executive Board since its creation in 1921. In every sense he was conservative, as devoted as Brundage to the nineteenth-century definition of amateurism, and, like de Coubertin and de Baillet-Latour, resistant to the involvement of women in the Olympics. He was, however, a man of immense energy and unfailing attention to detail – having, together with Viktor Balck, made such a success of the Stockholm Games – and would apply the same diligence when leading the IOC. Having become acting President in 1942, at the age of 71, he made the arduous and dangerous journey to the United States by courier plane to discuss the protection and the future of the IOC with Brundage, who, as stated, he immediately proposed for the inaugural position of second Vice-President. He himself had become Vice-President upon the death of Godefroy de Blonay in 1937.
Away from the war zones, travelling was not impossible for neutrals – or for Germans. Lewald, for instance, was able to holiday in Switzerland, while von Halt made trips to Paris and Sweden. It had been possible, moreover, in June 1944, to celebrate in Lausanne the 50th anniversary of the IOC’s foundation. The only IOC members present were von Halt and Stephan Tchapratchikov of Bulgaria, who was predominantly resident in Berlin. Also present was Carl Diem, as Director of the International Olympic Institute, and delegates of the Swiss NOC, together with the widows of de Coubertin and de Blonay. Absent with apologies were de Baillet-Latour’s widow and Edström.
In August 1945, Edström, Brundage and Lord Aberdare, comprising the first post-war Executive Board meeting, met in London to discuss the revival of the Games. Though Aberdare was sceptical, the enthusiasm of Brundage – who had received special permission to travel on the Queen Elizabeth, while it was still requisitioned for military transport – and of the acting President carried the day. Possible candidates for 1948 were discussed, those interested being Lake Placid and St Moritz for the winter, Athens, Baltimore, Lausanne, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Philadelphia for the summer. A mail ballot was proposed with agreement that, if London was selected, the Board would recommend St Moritz for the winter. The first post-war Session was scheduled for Lausanne the following year. Edström reported that Otto Mayer, a 46-year-old Swiss, had been appointed Chancellor of the IOC Secretariat.
The following February it was announced that London was the overwhelming favourite in the ballot, the Lord Mayor of London having already promised commitment. At that year’s Session in Lausanne, Edström was elected as fourth IOC President, never mind that he was now nearly 76. He had been so, de facto, for nearly five years. Of the 73 members from the London Session of 1939, only 51 remained, and 13 new members were co-opted. Other decisions taken included the acceptance of the compromise of the FIS eligibility of instructors for skiing; rejection of petitions for the inclusion on the programme of archery, baseball, gliding, team handball, polo, roller-skating, table tennis and volleyball; and the transfer of the International Athletic Institute from Berlin to Lausanne. Thus ended Diem’s official activity for the IOC.
Three IOC Presidents: Henri de Baillet-Latour of Belgium (left), who died in 1942, his successor J. Sigfrid Edström of Sweden (right) and Avery Brundage study global relations. (© IOC)
The St Moritz Session prior to the Games was preoccupied by heated and lengthy debate concerning the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace (LIHG), formed in 1908. The LIHG was the recognised international federation for ice hockey. The problem arose when the American Athletics Union (AAU), the governing body of a number of amateur sports in the United States and a member of the LIHG, had expelled a number of commercial teams. These teams subsequently formed the American Hockey Association (AHA), which had also applied for LIHG recognition. In January 1948, two teams, the AHA and the AAU (NOC-approved), headed for St Moritz. Neither would withdraw, notwithstanding that at the Stockholm Session an amateur oath had been approved which declared: ‘I, the undersigned, declare on my honour, that I am an amateur according to the rules of the international federation governing my sport … that I am eligible in all respects for participation in the Olympic Games.’ When the St Moritz Session decreed that the LIHG was no longer recognised, that ice hockey was to be removed from the programme and that the local organising committee was censured for accepting the AHA team, the Swiss responded by threatening to cancel the Games, stating that ice hockey, the best-attended and most financially profitable of any sport, must be reinstated. The IOC relented, agreeing to restore ice hockey provided AHA results were excluded from the tournament and medal calculations. Brundage, his dedication to the amateur ethic and the AAU itself on the line, was in a frenzy but the Swiss organising committee defied the IOC and the AHA team competed, eventually finishing fourth. A year later the AHA would be disqualified for non-affiliation to the Olympic Movement. The LIHG’s recognition was withdrawn by the IOC.
The division of Summer and Winter Games as separate administrations came to be the post-war pattern. Although Switzerland had been isolated from, even if surrounded by, the Second World War, the country had suffered economically, no area more than its tourist trade. Many hotels and restaurants had been forced to close, so that the advent of the Winter Games at St Moritz provided a welcome financial boost from 20,000 spectators and more than 2,000 competitors, officials and media.
Neither Germany nor Japan were invited to participate, the official reason being that no government existed to whom the invitation could be sent. Lord Aberdare had minuted a protest at the prospect of Germany being involved in any potential Games as early as 1944, Brundage and Edström tactically side-stepping the issue through the absence of political recognition. With the fall of the Third Reich, von Halt and his fellow NOC officials had been interned in Buchenwald by the Russians and in spite of IOC representations von Halt remained captive for five years. A steadfast IOC continued to recognise the membership of both von Halt and the other German member, Duke Adolf-Friedrich von Mecklenburg. Indeed, food parcels and clothing were sent to their families. Greta, von Halt’s wife, assured the IOC that he had always rejected Hitler’s policies and loyal discretion was likewise accorded to Diem. Germany’s allies – Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Romania – did send teams, though they were unwelcome guests, with allegations of former Nazis being included amongst selections. Of the involuntary Soviet allies in the Cold War only Poland and Czechoslovakia were present. Newcomers were Chile, Denmark, Iceland, South Korea and Lebanon.
If the IOC had been insensitive in the 1930s to the persecution of Jews, they were now sensitive to retaining contact within the new Communist network. As for the Soviet Union, in 1946 it was decreed that their sports federations would have to become affiliated to an NOC before an IOC member could be elected from the USSR. A move in this direction began with the USSR’s participation at that year’s European Athletics Championships in Oslo. However, in Executive Board discussions the following year, it was agreed there was not the time for the formation of a Soviet NOC prior to the Games of 1948, even though by the end of 1947 the Soviets were affiliated in basketball, football, weightlifting and wrestling. There would, oddly, be no problem with the Soviet bloc over amateurism, regarding which Brundage, Lord Burghley and the rest continued to ride their high horse. Soviet assurances on amateur idealism obscured a rampant policy of full-time training for ‘civil servant’ international sportsmen.
There was a strange moral anomaly within the Session at St Moritz when Count Clarence von Rosen of Sweden sent a letter of resignation. On the one hand, von Rosen was known, from correspondence with Brundage, to be cynically sceptical about news of the holocaust that was gradually emerging, yet he pedantically drew to the IOC’s attention the undemocratic regulation of the international equestrian federation (FEI) that competitors must hold a commissioned military rank. The Belgian president of the FEI, Gaston de Trannoy, said the matter should be referred to the FEI, not the IOC. The interpretation of von Rosen became all the more relevant when the Swedish team that competed in London was disqualified after winning the gold medal on the basis that a Sgt Gehnäll Persson had been temporarily promoted to second lieutenant for the duration of the Games: the giveaway being that Persson rode wearing his sergeant’s cap. France were promoted to gold medal winners, though in 1950 the FEI duly democratised its regulations.
Those attending the Games of 1948 mostly accepted, even admired, the capacity of the British, in their condition of post-war deprivation which included food and clothes rationing, still to put on a show under the wartime adage ‘make do and mend’. The British had agreed to hosting as a further illustration of their commitment to basic freedoms. Staging the Games was doubly difficult in the light of the election of a socialist government whose priorities understandably lay elsewhere.
In spite of handicaps borne by many countries, the entry of over 4,000 competitors from 59 countries was the highest yet. A temporary running track was laid at Wembley Stadium and the surrounding halls that had been built for the 1924 Empire Exhibition were now utilised for other sports. With over 80,000 spectators on most days at Wembley, the Games even made a marginal profit on a gross expenditure totalling a moderate three-quarters of a million pounds.
King George VI welcomes IOC President Edström and members Lord Burghley (left) and Viscount Portal at Wembley, London. (© IOC)
‘It was a loss for me that my best years would probably have been during the Second World War, when of course there were no Games. I’d been originally a cyclist and only started my career as a skater in 1939–40. By the time of St Moritz my form was not so good, I’d had some accidents during cycle races and nobody gave me much of a chance, particularly as I had no experienced international Olympic coach. Yet my cycling had given me one important asset – that was the strength of my leg muscles. I’d been hoping to achieve a time of around 2:15 for the 1,500m, but managed only 2:18.1 behind Sverre Farstad of Norway, for a silver medal. People had warned me that I had no chance of beating Liaklev of Norway in the 5,000m, in which I came seventh, and I had decided not to bother with the 10,000m as I was too tired and stiff.
The Swedish team had no masseur and I could not sleep. Then at the last minute I was persuaded to have a go. I started only because I wished to show goodwill. For a long while in the race I thought they were giving me wrong intermediate times just to encourage me. I knew that there were so many good skaters to come later, so I just ran on without any particular ambition. After 7,000 metres, I had some pains but overcame them. Then I heard Prince Berthol, who was himself a good skater, shouting at me “Go on, you’ll win the gold.” I thought to myself that a prince could not make a joke about such things, so it stimulated me, and it was only later that I discovered I had a ten-second advantage over the Finn who came second. It was a real surprise, but so rewarding.’ (From an interview with Idrottsbladet)
(Åke Seyffarth (centre), photograph © IOC/Roebett)
The presence of Åke Seyffarth was typical of the St Moritz Games. The war had interrupted the training and development of a generation that by 1948 should have reached maturity, meaning that veterans such as Seyffarth were still sufficiently competitive to fill the gap in many instances. He was the world record holder, on 8:13.7, for the 5,000m but was advised that he would have little chance at this distance against Reidar Liaklev. Nonetheless, he might have gained a medal, even gold, had he not lost time on the final lap due to a minor collision with a Swedish photographer, who had encroached on to the ice to steal a picture of a possible unprecedented victory.
The veteran Åke Seyffarth, Sweden’s first Olympic speed skating champion, became one of the first commercially successful sports stars. (© IOC/Ruebelt)
Seyffarth’s performance in the 10,000m was, in the circumstances, exceptional. Though apparently unaware of his own blistering speed, he covered the first 5,000 metres in 9:20, and his winning 10,000m time of 17:26.3 was only two seconds outside the Olympic record. His triumph in St Moritz, the first ever in speed skating by Sweden, heightened his reputation at home and enabled him to become one of the first commercially successful Swedish sports stars when opening an equipment store. In a sport dominated in 1948 by the Scandinavians, the Soviet Union was not yet present. Failing conspicuously in a championship in Sweden the same year, all their coaches and officials had been dismissed on the orders of Stalin, to be replaced by KGB officials devoid of any sporting experience.
Almost the oldest of events was the toboggan, or skeleton race, staged on the unique Cresta Run and so far only ever held three times in the history of the Games – in 1928, now in 1948 and again in 2002. Linking the first two was the American John Heaton, second behind his first-placed brother Jennison on the previous occasion and now silver-medal winner again, 20 years later, at the age of 39. The Cresta epitomised the elite ambience of St Moritz, the Tobogganing Club having the most distinguished membership of any sporting organisation in Europe other than, perhaps, the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes. The winner this time, and anything but blue-blooded, was a rough-hewn young Italian, Nino Bibbia, who had grown up just across the border and whose father ran the local fruit and veg shop. Regular practice had given him intimate experience of the frightening course, including Shuttlecock, often a disastrous bend for others. Discounting what appeared a close shave on one run, Bibbia said: ‘I still had two fingers of space between the top of the bank and my toboggan – that’s enough.’
Nino Bibbia (ITA), son of a local greengrocer, wins the second-ever Olympic staging on the Cresta Run of the skeleton race. (© IOC)
Those of increasing years may have dominated some events, but not figure skating, where two teenagers, Dick Button of America, 18, and Barbara-Ann Scott of Canada, a year older, took the prizes. Button, a Harvard freshman, introduced an acrobatic revolution in his sport, thrilling the crowds with the first public performance in Europe of the double axel. Like Scott, he practised 20 hours a week but had omitted the double axel from the European Championships in Prague immediately prior to the Games. Repeated perfect landings in subsequent training convinced him now to risk the innovation. ‘The cravenness of backing away from something because of the pressure of an Olympic Games repulsed me,’ he wrote in his autobiography ‘and once I had made up my mind, I could not divert the steps that culminated in the double axel.’ Successfully achieving the jump, he was given a perfect 6 by one judge, to gain America’s first gold medal in men’s figure skating. Eight of the nine judges had placed him first, except needless to say the Swiss, who voted for the local Hans Gerschwiler, the silver medal winner.
In 1947 Scott had won the World Championships, following which the Mayor of her home town, Ottawa, had given her the keys to a new car. Protests from the IOC led to her returning the gift. The only impediment to her victory in St Moritz came from a melting, rutted surface caused by warm winds. In fur-trimmed all-white, she was a fitting successor to the balletic Henie. Taking Henie’s example, Scott immediately turned professional … and re-collected her car.
Henri Oreiller of France was a well-known rally and motor-racing driver besides being a daredevil skier, seemingly immune to hazards. In Alpine skiing, officially baptised as a full sport at St Moritz, he proceeded to win the men’s downhill and combination, and a bronze medal in the special slalom. An almost suicidal downhill run gave him victory by more than four seconds, a huge margin, over Franz Gabl of Austria. His headlong bravery has been matched probably only by Franz Klammer in 1976. Halfway down he had survived a near fall, regaining his balance on only one ski. He was later to meet his death when driving a Ferarri in a race at Montlhery, not far from Paris, in 1962.
Dare-devil Henri Oreiller of France, renowned motor racing driver, confirmed his risk-taking nerve in the downhill, one of his three Alpine medals. (© IOC)