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228 pages

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The VIII Olympiad, the eighth volume in The Olympic Century series, begins in the most extraordinary of cities at a most extraordinary time: Paris in the 1920s. Now the stuff of legend, it was a place where the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso discussed art and culture in the cafes by day and danced in the jazz clubs long into the night. Played out in front of this dazzling backdrop, the Games of Paris 1924 created its own legends. Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, cemented his status as the most dominant distance runner of the age, claiming five gold medals in individual and team competition. In the pool, a 20-year-old American named Johnny Weissmuller won three golds in swimming and a bronze in water polo, while also winning acclaim for his chiselled physique. Weissmuller would go on to parlay his Olympic fame into a long Hollywood acting career playing Tarzan the Ape Man.The focus then shifts to 1928 and the second Winter Olympic Games, held in the luxurious French resort town of St. Moritz. The book paints a picture of exuberant crowds cheering as fearless sledders pilot primitive bobsleighs down the treacherous Cresta run, and urging the Swedish lumberjack Per Erik Hedlund through the slush for close to five hours to win the 50-kilometre cross-country ski race. It also tells the story of a smiling, 16-year-old figure skater from Norway named Sonja Henie, the unrivaled star of St. Moritz, who floated effortlessly between soft spots in the ice to win gold. Like Weissmuller four years earlier, Henie's Olympic triumph would also lead to Hollywood stardom. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former President of the International Olympic Committee, called The Olympic Century, "The most comprehensive history of the Olympic games ever published".

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Publié par	Warwick Press Inc.
Date de parution	18 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781987944075
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	8 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0262€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE OLYMPIC CENTURY THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MODERN OLYMPIC MOVEMENT VOLUME 8
THE VIII OLYMPIAD
PARIS 1924 ST. MORITZ 1928
by Ellen Phillips
W
Warwick Press Inc. Toronto
Copyright 1996 WSRP
The Olympic Century series was produced as a joint effort among the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and World Sport Research Publications, to provide an official continuity series that will serve as a permanent on-line Olympic education program for individuals, schools, and public libraries.
Published by:
Warwick Press Inc., Toronto
www.olympicbooks.com
1st Century Project: Charles Gary Allison
Publishers: Robert G. Rossi, Jim Williamson, Rona Wooley
Editors: Christian D. Kinney, Laura Forman
Art Director: Christopher M. Register
Picture Editors: Lisa Bruno, Debora Lemmons
Digital Imaging: Richard P. Majeske
Associate Editor, Research: Mark Brewin
Associate Editor, Appendix: Elsa Ramirez
Designers: Kimberley Davison, Diane Myers, Chris Conlee
Staff Researchers: Brad Haynes, Alexandra Hesse, Pauline Ploquin
Copy Editor: Harry Endrulat
Venue Map Artist: Dave Hader, Studio Conceptions, Toronto
Fact Verification: Carl and Liselott Diem Archives of the German Sport University at Cologne, Germany
Statistics: Bill Mallon, Walter Teutenberg
Memorabilia Consultants: Manfred Bergman, James D. Greensfelder, John P. Kelly, James B. Lally, Ingrid O Neil
Office Staff: Diana Fakiola, Brian M. Heath, Edward J. Messier, Brian P. Rand, Robert S. Vassallo, Chris Waters
Senior Consultant: Dr. Dietrich Quanz (Germany)
Special Consultants: Walter Borgers, Dr. Karl Lennartz, Dr. Dietrich Quanz, Dr. Norbert Mueller (Germany), Ian Buchanan (United Kingdom), Wolf Lyberg (Sweden), Dr. Nicholas Yalouris (Greece).
International Contributors: Jean Durry (France), Dr. Fernand Landry (Canada), Dr. Antonio Lombardo (Italy), Dr. John A. MacAloon (U.S.A.), Dr. Jujiro Narita (Japan), C. Robert Paul (U.S.A.), Dr. Roland Renson (Belgium), Anthony Th. Bijkirk (Netherlands), Dr. James Walston (Ombudsman)
International Research and Assistance: John S. Baick (New York), Matthieu Brocart (Paris), Alexander Fakiolas (Athens), Bob Miyakawa (Tokyo), Rona Lester (London), Dominic LoTempio (Columbia), George Kostas Mazareas (Boston), Georgia McDonald (Colorado Springs), Wendy Nolan (Princeton), Alexander Ratner (Moscow), Jon Simon (Washington, D.C.), Frank Strasser (Cologne), Val ry Turco (Lausanne), Laura Walden (Rome), Jorge Zocchi (Mexico City)
All rights reserved. No part of The Olympic Century book series may be copied, republished, stored in a retrieval system, or otherwise reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written consent of Warwick Press Inc.
eBook Conversion: eBook Partnership, United Kingdom
ISBN (Series) 978-1-987944-24-2
ISBN (Volume 8) 978-1-987944-07-5
CONTENTS
I P EERLESS P ARIS , P EERLESS P AAVO
II T HE G OLDEN D AYS
III F AREWELLS AND F URORS
IV T HE S NOWS OF Y ESTERYEAR
A PPENDIX
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P HOTO C REDITS
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX

PEERLESS PARIS, PEERLESS PAAVO
PARIS 1924
Nobody has the stillness of a great athlete in the instant before great action. Cloaked in the solitude of concentration, shot through with gathered power, calm in certain mastery, the athlete is at that moment all the beauty of the human world, the paragon of animals. No one who sees such a sight ever forgets. No one in the Olympic Stadium in Paris at 3:45 on the afternoon of July 10, 1924, ever lost the image of Paavo Nurmi as he set out to define the possible. In the midst of a humming crowd, on the fringes of a glittering, feverish city, the Finn was a still point in a turning world.
In himself, Nurmi was unprepossessing. He was short and barrel-chested, a pale-haired man with pale, cold eyes. But his coiled stillness, braced in the starting holes of a cinder track, hips up, arms rigid, a stopwatch in the palm of his right hand, held the attention. Perhaps it was the contrast between the small figure and its astounding power that made Nurmi the legend he became.
He was called a machine, but machines, in their impervious, godlike power, were still images of strength and fascination then: Artists painted them. Dancers imitated them. It was Nurmi s cold perfection that called for the epithet. When he planned his distance races-and he always planned-he was practical in his strength. This race was 1,500 meters: It was the first of the day. Then he would run 5,000 meters. But this was the time for this race.
Here was how things stood: Nurmi had set the world record for the 1,500 three weeks before, as he had for the 5,000 meters (the times were 3:52.56 for the shorter race, 14:28.2 for the longer). His competition in Paris was not formidable, by his standards. The strongest competitors were British: Henry Stallard, undefeated at home, and Douglas Lowe, who had taken the 800 meters from Stallard on July 8. Stallard was running on a seriously injured foot. Lowe was young. And in any case, the British made a point of not training seriously (a gentleman sportsman did not train seriously). There were three good Americans and another Finn who did train seriously, but not as seriously as Paavo Nurmi. The Swiss, Wilhelm Scharer, had run the fastest heat, but Nurmi, conserving energy, had taken his heats easily, running only what he needed to qualify.
Below: Paavo Nurmi, June 13, 1897-January 20, 1973. Olympic Gold Medalist, 1920, 1924, 1928

WHERE THE GAMES WERE PLAYED
Below: Winter V lodrome

Below: Colombes Stadium

Below: Tourelles Pool

Nurmi s real rival was not in this race, after all, but off resting before the 5,000 meters, to be run in just an hour s time. That rival s name was Vilho Ritola; Americans called him Willie. Earlier in the week he had taken golds in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and the 10,000-meter run-the latter a race, Nurmi bitterly believed, that should have been his. He had plans for Ritola. The 1,500 meters, the prestigious Olympic mile, was only the first step.
The gun cracked and Lowe surged ahead, leading the field at the first turn. An instant later a roar from the stands and a blue-and-white flash on his right told Lowe he was outclassed. Stopwatch in hand to keep himself on schedule, Nurmi set an outrageous pace, tempting Stallard and the Americans, Raymond Buker and Raymond Watson, to follow. Stallard and Buker, realizing that their strength for a final sprint was being sapped, quickly dropped back; the less experienced Watson hung on, losing power with every move. They finished the 500-meter circuit in 1:13.2-faster than champions would run it 40 years later on new and swifter tracks, where modern tactics would mandate slower starts and faster finishes.
In the second lap, Nurmi settled into his distinctive pace and style, his back straight, his fists relaxed and rather high. So long was his stride that his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. The rest of the field, except for the dogged Watson, was 80 yards behind. When the bell sounded the final lap, Nurmi tossed his stopwatch onto the grass verge and, with no apparent effort, pulled away from Watson. Glancing back with detached interest at the fight for second place, Nurmi took the last circuit in a relaxed 82 seconds: He was saving fuel, running not to set records but to win. Behind him, his face twisted with pain, Stallard managed to pull abreast of Scharer at the 10-yard mark. But Scharer moved ahead in a final burst, and Stallard collapsed across the finish line.
Nurmi had won the race in 3:53.6, an Olympic record only a second slower than his world mark. That was not a hard race, the Finn remarked with customary hauteur. I am not in the least tired. Then, while the unconscious Stallard was carried off by his teammates, Nurmi casually retrieved his watch, picked up his sweater, and headed for the Catacombs of Colombes-the warren of locker rooms hidden under the VIP stands. He had another race to run in less than an hour, though it hardly seemed possible that spirit and body could recover in so short a time, after such a performance.
Paavo Nurmi was in many ways the human paradigm of these Games. Born in the final years of the old era-he was 27 in 1924-he took the approach of the new: He trained in professional style, his focus obsessively fastened on winning. He was at the same time a model of the amateur, an athlete who ran for the love of it. Self-supporting, self-taught, he trained alone according to his own system, sometimes on tracks, sometimes on the dirt roads that threaded the reaches of Finland s pine forests.
It was apt that Nurmi, straddling two different epochs in sport, became a legend at the Games of the VIII Olympiad, Games that marked a transition from the old order to the new. The old was honored by the International Olympic Committee s choice of Paris to host the Games: Paris was, after all, the birthplace of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic movement. It was Coubertin who, through sheer force of will, had breathed life back into the Games after their moribund slumber of one and a half millennia. The baron was retiring now as president of the IOC, having seen his festival transformed from a sometimes disorganized, sometimes neglected, and sometimes quarrelsome curiosity to an event with the international stature he had dreamed of-although not always in the way he had dreamed.
Paris 1924 was a monument to Coubertin s achievement, bringing together more nations and more athletes than any Games before- 3,092 competitors from 44 countries. For the first time the Games were played not according to host-country rules, but according to those standardized by the international federations governing each sport.

And the French, whose Paris 1900 Games had been chaotic at best, did themselves proud in 1924. The contests were elaborately organized and housed. The Olympic