The revival of the Olympic Games in modern times owes a great deal to a doctor from a small town in Shropshire. William Penny Brookes was born in 1809 in Much Wenlock, where he spent his entire working life until he died there in 1895. His legacy has been the amateur Games that take place in the great cities of the world every four years and are starting on 26 July 2024 in Paris.
The son of the local doctor, Brookes qualified and took over the practice when his father died. He was consumed by a passion for self-improvement and the elevation of the working class, so set up the Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society in 1841 which loaned books to people too poor to buy them. To fund his endeavours he wrote to such celebrities as the ironmaster Abraham Darby IV and the Duke of Wellington, requesting financial donations and gifts of books.
As an adjunct to the library, he organised classes including art, ‘philharmonic’ (music study) and botany. He also set up an ‘Olympian Class’, demonstrating a belief in the improving power of athletics. According to the minutes of a public society meeting in 1850, it was resolved unanimously “That it was desirable that a class should be established in connexion with the Agricultural Reading Society for the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town & neighbourhood of Wenlock and especially of the Working classes, by the encouragement of out-door recreation, and by the award of Prizes annually at public meetings for skill in Athletic exercise and proficiency in Intellectual and industrial attainments”.
The first Wenlock Olympian Games were held in October 1850. They were a mixture of athletics and traditional country games such as quoits, football and cricket. Categories were not so distinct as they would become, with newspapers referring to the “half mile foot race” and the “leaping in distance” event.
It was at this point that the earnest, self-improving ideal of the Victorians joined with their adulation of the classical past. The civilisation of ancient Greece was held up as an ideal. Could the games festivals of the 6th century BCE, the most famous of which were held in Olympia on the Peloponnese peninsula, be revivified for the modern era?
Brookes corresponded with Greek, French and German enthusiasts for reviving the ancient Games. One was a young French aristocrat called Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was making a name for himself promoting physical education and the role of sport in schools.
Brookes invited him to Much Wenlock in 1890, where a session of the Olympian Games was held in his honour. The 27-year-old baron and 81-year-old doctor became friends, and Brookes shared with Coubertin his dream of an Olympic revival with Games held in Athens.
Coubertin took the baton and ran with it, using his elite international connections and his prodigious energy to inspire others. On 25 November 1892, at a meeting of the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques in Paris, he advocated a revived Olympic Games with the lofty ambition that “the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally”.
Much lobbying and committee work followed. An international conference on sport in 1894 accepted his proposal for the Olympic Games, although with little enthusiasm. The first Games were to be held in Athens in April 1896 under an International Olympic Committee (IOC) which ended up (after the First World War) being based in Lausanne, Switzerland, where it still resides. Sadly, Brookes died four months before the Games opened.
In all 14 nations took part, all of them European except for the USA. It was the largest international participation of any sporting occasion to date. Events included cycling, wrestling, shooting, fencing and the marathon.
Women had not been permitted to participate in the Games but a Greek woman, 30-year-old Stamata Revithi, turned up in the town of Marathon to begin the run. She was not allowed to compete but ran the marathon anyway the next day, and finished in about 5 hours 30 minutes.
Women competed in the Games for the first time at the next Olympics, held in Paris in 1900. Swiss sailor Countess Hélène de Pourtalès was the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal, as the member of a crew in a yacht race. The first woman to win gold as an individual was British tennis player Charlotte Cooper, also in 1900.
Various innovations and improvements took place as the Olympics developed. In 1921 it was decided to hold an additional Games in the winter, to host snow and ice sports that could not be undertaken in summer.
Attendance at the Olympics was sometimes an endurance event in itself with long queues for entrance, refreshments and facilities. The IOC worked to insist that if a city was going to host the Olympics, it must have adequate facilities. There was no accounting for the weather, however: at the 1924 Olympics it was so hot that spectators fainted. The temperature for the 10km cross-country run was more than 40 °C, and over half of the 38 contestants failed to finish.
Competitors had to organise their own accommodation until 1932. That year the Los Angeles Games inaugurated the tradition of the Olympic Village, where athletes were housed together.
The Olympics took a grim turn in 1936 when they were held in Berlin under the new Nazi government. The authoritarian and antisemitic regime was shown to be a bad loser when black American athlete Jesse Owens became the star of the Games, winning four gold medals. Chancellor Adolf Hitler refused to shake his hand and when the crowd rose to salute Owens after he won the 200m sprint, he left the stadium.
No Games took place during the Second World War, then the ‘austerity Games’ were held in London in 1948 with no new buildings. The events were mostly held in Wembley Stadium and the Empire Pool at Wembley Park.
The USA won the most golds, and the greatest number of medals overall. The Soviet Union declined to attend, and Germany and Japan had not been invited. Israel wanted to compete, but had not been recognised as a country yet by the committee.
Some argued that the country should focus on reconstruction after four years of war, not the Games, but in the event they were enjoyed as a national celebration. Sunday Mirror reporter Peter Wilson wrote, “After years of austerity it’s like a mighty audience brought up on gloomy black and white films and suddenly seeing their first ‘talkie’ – and finding it’s in colour, too. Imagine an emerald cut into an oblong and surrounded by a circlet of rust. That’s the Wembley turf, enclosed by the track. Imagine a giant’s sugar bowl full of coloured hundreds-and-thousands. That’s what the stands look like when they are full.”
The tradition of the Olympic flame being brought from Greece originated for the Berlin Games in 1936, and was continued in London. On 17 July 1948 in Olympia a ceremony was held amid the ruins of the temples of Zeus and Hera. The flame was lit by the rays of the sun, concentrated by a mirror, then a Greek athlete carried the torch to Port Katakolon. The flame was taken aboard a Greek destroyer which sailed for Corfu, where the torch was transferred to a British frigate. After a journey across the seas, the torch was carried into Wembley Stadium by a medical student and runner named John Mark. Wilson described the scene: “With a sudden gesture he plunges the Torch downwards to kindle the Olympic Flame… The massed athletes – Danes in crimson, Indians in blue and white, Iraqis in bottle green, Koreans in grey, Pakistanis in leaf green, and representatives of all the fifty-eight competing nations – have not been able to resist the compulsion of cheering on The Runner.”
July 1948 also saw the first Stoke Mandeville Games held in Buckinghamshire. They were organised by neurologist Ludwig Guttmann, who ran the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and wanted to promote the rehabilitation of soldiers. Following subsequent successful Games, in 1960 he took 400 athletes to the Olympic Games in Rome for a ‘Parallel Olympics’ with disabled people. Since then, Paralympics have been held in every Olympic year.
The 1960 Games in Rome were also the first to have worldwide TV coverage. However, this also increased the appetite for controversies such as when a Danish cyclist died after taking a performance-enhancing drug. In 1968 in Mexico competitors gave the black-power salute on the podium as a gesture towards the civil-rights campaign in the USA. Four years later the Olympic Village at the Munich Games was invaded by eight armed Palestinian militants, who killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage. In a rescue attempt all of the hostages and one policeman were killed, as were five of the terrorists.
Thankfully, such events have been rare in the history of the modern Olympics. The enduring sentiment is of the amateur competitive spirit, expressed in the words of Baron de Coubertin himself: “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”