Matthew P. Llewellyn

‘Viva l'Italia! Viva l'Italia!’ Dorando Pietri and the North American Professional Marathon Craze, 1908–10

The highly dramatic conclusion of the marathon event at the 1908 London Olympic Games ignited a ‘marathon craze’ that swept throughout North America. Enticing the worlds leading long-distance runners, such as Italian Dorando Pietri and Irish-American gold medallist Johnny Hayes, to make the transfer from the amateur to the professional ranks, promoters propelled pedestrianism into a commercial ambience. Connected with gambling, vaudeville and municipal politics, and fuelled by battles for ethnic and racial superiority, professional pedestrianism accentuated the underworld of American sport that thrived throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the millions of Italian immigrants that arrived onto American shores during this period, the performances of Dorando Pietri, the fallen hero from the London games, helped the nascent Italian communities in America craft and take pride in their own ethnic identity in their new homeland.

For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Associations ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.

‘The Best Distance Runner the World Has Ever Produced’: Hannes Kolehmainen and the Modernisation of British Athletics

At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Finnish long-distance runner Hannes Kolehmainen captivated British audiences following his sensational three gold medal performances. In the backdrop of a disappointing British showing in the Swedish capital, Kolehmainens heroics revealed the inexorable forces of globalisation and the rising competitiveness of international sport. Mindful of their nations declining standing in world sport, Britains Olympic leaders launched an ambitious scheme to revolutionise the nations amateur sporting culture. In this era of proposed reform, the British hailed Kolehmainen as a paragon of modern athletic and scientific excellence, a counterforce to the dilettantish and unmethodical British amateur sportsman. Reformers conceived that only by replicating the foreign, ‘working-class’ methods employed by Kolehmainen and his compatriots could Britain, the founding nation ofglobal sports culture, reclaim its position as the arbiter of international sport.

A Tale of National Disaster

With the closure of the London games, BOA leaders turned their immediate attentions towards capturing British success at the forthcoming 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. A conscious effort to avoid the organizational pitfalls that marred previous Olympic campaigns emerged as a discernible feature of British preparations, as BOA leaders sought to introduce modern and progressive methods of training and preparation. Void of public and governmental financial support, and hindered by fierce squabbling between both the Home-Nations and the various governing bodies of British amateur sport, the participation of a British team in Stockholm, as well as the very existence of the British Olympic movement hung precariously in the balance.

The Battle of Shepherd's Bush

In the annals of sport history, the 1908 Olympic Games in London stand as an unprecedented success, setting new standards in organisation, event planning and sporting achievement. The games are also remembered as an occasion for competitive national self-assertion, as Great Britain and its trans-Atlantic cousin the United States clashed in a desperate struggle for Olympic mastery. Fuelled by Irish-American nationalism, biased British officiating, competing sporting ideologies, as well as sensationalist reporting on both sides of the Atlantic, an intense Anglo-American rivalry plagued the 1908 London games. The scenes of controversy and bitter recriminations between British and American athletes, officials and high-ranking politicians went a long way to solidifying negative British attitudes towards Pierre de Coubertins international Olympic revival.

The Curse of the Shamateur

On 8 August 1927, the Executive Committee of the IOC voted to award broken-time payments to amateur football players during the 1928 Amsterdam games. In the wake of the bitter fall-out from the Paris games, where scenes of nationalistic squabbling forced many in Britain to consider the nations Olympic future, the Executive Committees concession appeared to deliver a death knell to the British Olympic movement. Moving to defend the purity of British-style amateurism against the rising tide of veiled professionalism and ‘broken-time’ payments, BOA leaders again threatened a permanent British Olympic withdrawal.

Prologue: An Indifferent Beginning

On 6 July 2005, during the 117th annual session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) held in Singapore, delegates voted to award the 2012 Summer Olympic Games to the city of London. In defeating a highly favoured Paris bid, the British capital realised the unrivalled prospect of hosting the Summer Games for the third time since Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s 1894 revival of the Olympic movement. For a nation that served as the cradle of modern sport, the IOC’s decision provided a crowning glory for British sporting and Olympic history. Born on the playgrounds of the nation’s most prestigious public schools during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern competitive sport flourished throughout the British Isles. The British embraced sport as a vehicle for the promotion of masculine virtue and muscular Christianity, and also as an instrument for empire building. They believed that sports such as cricket and rugby union solidified colonial and dominion relations with the motherland and furthered Britain’s territorial claims overseas. Even outside of the framework of empire, the British exported, both directly and indirectly, their games to the farthest reaches of the globe. In the Pax Britannica, an age of unrivalled British commercial and naval power that followed Waterloo, sailors, merchants and engineers introduced British sporting pastimes to foreign lands, established the organisational framework that ensured their diffusion and inspired the development of local traditions and patterns of play. The British not only spread sport around the globe, they organised and controlled the process as well. Through their dominance and control of bureaucratic organisations such as the Football Association (1863), the Jockey Club (1752), the Marylebone Cricket Club (1788) and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (1754), the British provided the formal codification and national administration that propelled sport from its traditional roots towards its place in modernity. They revelled in their role as the leader of international sport, espousing their own chivalrous ideology of amateurism and fair play, a sporting ethos that was translated into guidelines for social intercourse. By the second half of the nineteenth century a sports mania had gripped the British Isles. Fuelled by the twin forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, football, rugby union and cricket became not only pastimes but passions for the British, transcending and reconfiguring class, racial and eventually gender boundaries, and pervading social and literary discourses. Renowned West

The Historical Legacy of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games

Of the post-War Olympics, few burn brighter in the popular memory than the 1984 Los Angeles Games. London in 1948 ensured that the Olympic Games continued after the brutality and destruction of WWII; Japan in 1964 brought the Games to Asia; Mexico City in 1968 and Munich in 1972 provided visible images of protest and tragedy. Aside from a few iconic images, however, those Games fade into the backdrop with a plethora of Olympic moments that have defined a global sporting phenomenon. What explains the enduring images that many still hold towards the Games known as ‘LA84’? In many ways, this seemingly straightforward question defies a clear answer. An important component of the lasting impressions of the 1984 Olympics remains their successes. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games stands as the most profitable and, perhaps for that reason, arguably the most important event in the history of the modern Olympic Movement. Fresh off the back of the terrorist attacks at the Munich Games (1972), the financially disastrous Montreal Games (1976) and the politically controversial Moscow Games (1980), the Olympic Movement returned to the USA for the sixth time in an attempt to salvage the economic viability and global prestige of the Olympics. The Los Angeles Games, despite its financial success, also proved to be both provocative and polarising. On the one hand it has been heralded as an overwhelming, transformative success, ushering the Olympic movement into the modern commercial age. Led by the dynamic and sagacious Peter Ueberroth, the Games set new standards in Olympic commercialism, boasting record-breaking television contracts and corporate sponsorship deals. On the other hand, some scholarly critics have repudiated the Games as a manifestation of commercial excess and a platform for Western political and cultural propaganda. The 1984 Olympic Games recorded unprecedented profits (

Olympic Games Doomed

232.5 million surplus). For some, Los Angles’ glamour revitalised the flagging Olympic Movement and provided it with a new cultural template that would keep the Olympics relevant in the twenty-first century. However, one cannot deny that the wave of heightened commercialism and professionalisation that followed in its wake diverge from the idealistic vision of International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents such as Pierre de Coubertin and Avery Brundage. Politics even left an ambiguous, though memorable, legacy. The Soviet Union and 14 of its Communist allies stayed away – though for reasons that will be outlined later. But the absences should not overshadow LA84’s global participation. An impressive 6829 (1566 women, 5263 men) athletes from 140 nations, including the People’s Republic of China and Romania, arrived in the ‘Golden State’ to vie for Olympic glory. Millions of

The Empire Savers

The immediate post-war years revealed that all was clearly not well within the British Olympic movement. Battling against the tide of widespread public and governmental apathy and opposition, the BOA persevered in its attempts to raise a British team for the forthcoming 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Backed by a coterie of prominent patricians and Conservative politicians, the BOA endeavoured to raise the funds needed to help reclaim Britains lost sporting prowess. In spite of the BOAs renewed efforts, the chauvinistic scenes that marred the 1924 Paris games both reaffirmed British suspicions that the Olympics were a politico-sporting contest between nation-states and sparked renewed calls for a full-scale British Olympic withdrawal.