How I came to write about sport...

I had an unconventional education as a child. I largely managed to avoid organised sport. I do have one vivid memory of freezing cold, mud and the aggression of small girls from a time when, aged 12, I was forced to play lacrosse. (On the lacrosse field goal was considered the best position for girls of my dimensions: don’t have to move much and come with own padding.) Then there was that brief summer flirtation at college on the perfect afternoon, when the grass was green but dry and there was good company, chilled wine and good looking boys in cricket whites. But to be honest, my idea of physical recreation is balancing on a gym ball to watch television.

So, on the face of it, the idea that someone who has never run a race and whose response to Olympic coverage is to head for Blockbusters, should presume to take such a subject as the London Olympics of 1908 seems absurd.

I found my way to the subject by accident. In spring 2006 I was contracted to research the 1908 Marathon for a film company. I took on the task as an opportunity to investigate what was to me virgin territory. I was intrigued by the underlying assumption - central to the Olympic vision - that sport is one of the few things that unites us all.

Now, I appreciate that to others sport is drama - noble and real - but to me it always lacked the dialogue and character development that seemed to me essential to dramatic entertainment.

 

 

My Grandad loved sport. He was small, stocky and very strong but short sighted. As a teenager he swam for his county; he loved football and boxing too. Grandad got his first job as a reporter at the age of 18 in 1912 and for most of his working life he was a stringer for national press and news services covering local news and sport from Sheffield to Barnsley. He was 14 at the time of the 1908 Olympics and he caught the Olympic spirit. When my mother came along his great ambition was that she should compete as a 100 yard sprinter in the second London Olympics of 1948.

 

 

From the age of five he would take her out in all weathers on the Town Fields in Doncaster, stop watch in hand. In winter, when the nights drew in, they would take a hurricane lantern to light their way home. Later he added javelin, discus and shot-put to the repertoire. He would take the javelin when they went on holiday to the seaside at Skegness - clearing the beach as he practiced. It embarrassed his children. His commitment took my mother to junior athletic meetings where she won a gold watch and a variety of dressing-table sets.

Grandad’s Olympic dream vanished under doctor’s orders when my mother turned 10. She never talked about that period of her life much when I was growing up. The only thing she ever really told me about her early training - apart from the fact that it was cold & uncomfortable - was her regret at not being bought a pair of the black velvet running knickers worn by her better dressed competitors.

I listened to Grandad’s stories as a child, and I loved him; but I failed him in his lifetime. I could not understand how passion could well up over a fraction of a second.

 

 

But years after his death, as I turned over newspaper archives of summer 1908, I was caught by that picture - “The” picture from the first London Games; the one thing people still remember today: Dorando Pietri, the little Italian with knobbly knees and a look of Charlie Chaplin, staggering towards the tape herded by a semi-circle of officials and policemen. It is the iconic image of the “ordinary Joe” almost killing himself to achieve his goal. That picture began to open me up to an entrancing story.

 

 

This is a tale of the extraordinary endeavors of ordinary men - sugar bakers and policemen and market gardeners - and more. There is a White City of palaces built by a Hungarian showman who knew how to deploy his fairy lights; a heroically dutiful sporting aristocrat and the Greatest Stadium in the world (at the time); international controversy and a diplomatic queen, and a Red Indian struck down by strychnine. I hope it will amuse both the sportingly challenged, like me, and with luck the sporting faithful as well. And if Grandad is watching somewhere, I hope he approves.

        Rebecca Jenkins