Introduction

One hundred years ago London hosted its first Olympic Games by chance. Rome, the chosen host city, pulled out at short notice after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in spring 1906. The crisis threatened to halt Baron de Coubertin's cherished revival of the Olympic Games. A group of gentlemanly English sporting enthusiasts, led by William Grenfell, Lord Desborough, offered to mount the Fourth Olympiad in London. They had two years, no budget and no suitable venue and if they failed there was a chance that Baron de Coubertin's Olympic movement would end in 1908.

 

The 1908 Games were the first Olympics at which contestants competed in national teams. They were the first to be filmed and the first to generate widely published photographic images. Some of the Pathé brothers' footage still survives and can be seen at the Pathé website.

The First London Games had to contend with a typically sodden British summer in the first week and antagonism between a US team dominated by New York Irish Americans. There were a succession of "Scandals": the Tug-of-War event where the cream of the American team found themselves bested by a group of Liverpool policemen, the 400 meter final where the American finalists were withdrawn by their managers on an accusation of a foul, leaving the lone Englishman to run for gold on his own; and the now legendary Marathon.

 

 

Without the efforts of Lord Desborough and his band of volunteer sportsmen in 1908 the quadrennial Olympic Games might not have survived to this day.

A British policeman pulls over the Swedish Team in a cartoon by Swedish satirist, Torsten Schonberg.

If you would like to read an extract of the book. Click here to open a PDF file in a new window (2.3Mb).

The First London Olympics: 1908 is a Piatkus book, published by the Little, Brown Book Group

London 2012 will be the third London Olympics To find out about the London Games that came between click here and read about it in The Austerity Olympics, When the Games came to London in 1948.