With cannon fire and a rather slow version of Australia's most popular song, "Waltzing Matilda", Melbourne opened the 1956 Summer Olympics on a cloudy and cool Thursday afternoon. The ceremony, that started at 3:00 PM local time, had nothing of the modern day pomp and pageantry. The somber mood was apt to the politically turbulent times. Considering the backdrop of the crises in Hungary and in the Suez, many people around the globe considered it to be a success that the Games were held at all. German commentator Dr. Paul Laven wrote: "The Olympic flames saves peace on earth!" (picture: Getty)
A spirit of newness and the unusual sorrounded this opening day. Never before had the Games been staged in the southern hemisphere. Never before had an opening ceremony been held so late in the year, with most of the season virtually over for the top-tier athletes from Europe and America and Melbourne's shop windows already featuring Christmas decoration. Nevertheless, it was the Australian audience and their genuine love for sports that saved the opening day and the fortnight to come.
Queen Elizabeth had send her husband Prince Philipp, the Duke of Edinburgh, Down Under to officially declare open the Games. Before that, the parade of nations had seen the first Summer Olympics appearance of a unified team from East and West Germany. Roaring applause welcomed the team from civil war torn Hungary that had left Budapest at the height of the revolution. Many athletes were unsure about the fate of their loved ones back home when arriving at Melbourne, many were never going to go home again (picture: Getty).
Despite of the boycott by the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Egypt, Iran, and the Lebanon, 69 nations entered, equalling the record set four years earlier at Helsinki. While young Australian running hopeful Ron Clarke was almost burnt when he lit the Olympic cauldron, his mentor and hero John Landy spoke the oath for all the athletes (picture: olympics.com.au).
While a lot of things were new on this day, there was also one historic last: This opening ceremony was the last in history not to be followed live by a global TV audience. Australian TV ABC had started broadcasting just two weeks before. At the time of the opening ceremony, only 5000 television sets had been sold in the whole country. Tapes from the opening ceremony and the following competitions were carried to Sydney by car, where the footage was refurbished into daily reports. Outside of Australia, only few moving pictures could be seen - and that only three to five days later (picture: abctvgorehill.com.au).
While a new German book sheds new light on the infamous 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen these days, many people don't know today how critical parts of the foreign press reacted to the feast in the snow. Many writers who came to the Bavarian alps in February 1936 regarded the show exactly as what it was: a prelude for the Nazi's propaganda stunt that was to come in the summer in Berlin. One of the harshest critics was Westbrook Pegler (1894 - 1969). His columns "Fair Enough" that were printed among others in The Washington Post were surch hard stuff that German Olympic official Carl Diem called him "one of the most dangerous men in Garmisch". In the end, Pegler did not even get a visa to visit the Summer Games (picture: br.de).
The Post had made its mark before. During the American boycott debate from 1933 to 1935, it had strongly opposed the Olympics in Nazi Germany. And Pegler was far from alone in his criticism, his views on the propaganda spectacle being shared among others by famous Berlin radio correspondent William L. Shirer. The anticipation of politicized and even racist Games led to the fact, as Pegler wrote, that there were more political journalists in Garmisch-Partenkirchen than even the Nazis must have had expected. "Heavy duty thinkers", as Pegler called them in one of his columns. The showings of Adolf Hitler at Garmisch to Pegler resembled that of a "Roman Emperor".
Pegler (picture: oztypewriter.blogspot.com) summed up his impression impression of the militaristic, unsportsmanlike atmosphere at the Games in a column with the headline "Arms And Olympics" that was published in the Post on February 18th: "Soldiers are everywhere in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. All the soldiers wear the Swastika. This gives a strange suggestion of war in the little mountain resort where sportsmen are drawn together in a great demonstration of international friendship. The scene is strongly reminiscent of the zone behind the front when divisions were being rushed to the sector of the next offensive. At home we've never found it necessary to mobilize an army for a sport event."
With these few sentences, Pegler had ripped into pieces the picture of peace and happiness the Nazis had planned to show to the world at the Games. And he went even further: After German officials had publicly protested against his writings and called him a liar, Pegler answered four days later with a column called "A Correction", which was in fact an "apology" even harder to swallow for Hitler's devotees:
"Those weren't troops at all but merely peace-loving German workmen in their native dress, and those weren't army lorries but delivery wagons carrying beer and wieners and kraut. They don't really march at all. They just walk in step in columns of four, because they like to walk that way. And it is an old custom of theirs to form cordons of military appearance along the curbs and just stand there by the hour for pleasure. When thousands of men seem to march but don't in clothing and tin-hats which seem to be military uniforms but aren't and carry harmless utensils which appear to be bayonets any stranger is likely to make the same mistake." (picture: gaponline.de)
This was too much for the Nazis- Pegler - who was observed by the Gestapo during the Winter Games - had to stay home the next summer. From his desk, he continued to write against the Games of 1936 and reiterated his opinion that the Germans were not really clever in their propaganda efforts, that most foreigners understood what was really going on. On July 5th, a few weeks before the Summer Games, he wrote in The Washington Post: "The [the Nazis] spied on their guests and resorted to incredibly stupid attempts to bulldoze or seduce foreign correespondents into Nazi propaganda. They were so dumb, however, that the upshot of it all was that they made chumps of themselves before the civilized races. Nobody was deceived. They are such thick, bungling dopes, those Nazi politicians, that they are always showing themselves up in stratagems which they intended to be subtle. They will do it again this summer."
That no visitor to Germany in 1936 was tricked by the Nazi peace show may have been an exaggeration. But at least, Westbrook Pegler made sure his readers were not.
Surely, Barcelona had history on her side. When the Catalan capital was awarded the 1992 Summer Games in October 1986, nobody knew that the world was just going through the last phase of the Cold War. Six years later, on opening night, July 25th, 1992, Montjuic Stadium witnessed the dawn of the Games of the new world order. The parade of nations was a caleidoscope of unifications and split-ups, comebacks and newcomers.
For the first time since 1964, Germany fielded a unified team (picture: imago), while the remnants of the Soviet Union were merely held together by the so-called "Unified Team" - a one-time construction that was replaced by the nations of the former U.S.S.R. four years later in Atlanta. Some new or reborn eastern European countries were already on the starting bloc in Spain: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Croatia and Slovenia.
All in all, Barcelona ended almost two decades of Olympic boycotts. Cuba returned for the first time since Moscow 1980 under the eyes of a cheerfully waving Fidel Castro. Even North Korea was on the starting bloc again.
But Barcelona also saw the first appearance of the so called "Independent Olympic Participant". While civil war had reaped havoc all over former Yugoslavia, her athletes were only allowed to start at the Games in single events. In the end, the competitors from Serbia and Macedonia won three medals - all in shooting
From a sporting perspective, the undisputed highlight of the 1992 Games was the U.S. basketball "Dream Team". The NBA stars put on the greatest single spectacle the Olympics had ever seen, with fans and international media going crazy. "Dream Team" head coach Chuck Daly put it that way: "This feels like being on tour with twelve rock stars."
The "Dream Team" was later often copied, but non of its successors came close to the quality, the aura, and the euphoria surrounding the original.
Finally, 1992 provided one of the most emotional and inspiring episodes in the history of the Games and of sport at all. Center stage took 400 meter runner Derek Redmond from Great Britain. A world class athlete whose career had been plagued by injuries, Redmond tore a muscle after 150 meters of his semifinal run. He continued to limp towards the finish line. On the home stretch, he was accompanied and assisted by his father, tears all over his face. A memorable moment that shook the hearts of almost any spectator.
No wonder the IOC later used the images of Redmond's effort as part of a commercial campaign. The fitting title was "Celebrate Humanity".
While the 1936 Nazi Games have made big waves in German media this summer, another part of the capital's Olympic history has been fortgotten and remaines untold: One century ago, on July 1st, 1916, Emperor Wilhelm II planned to open the Games of the VIth Olympiad. It did not happen, the Games were the first to fall victim to a war.
Officially, Berlin 1916 was never cancelled. This is even more astonishing, considering the efforts Imperial Germany made to put on a grandiose propaganda spectacle. The "German Stadium" (pictures: Bundesarchiv, Library of Congress), opened on June 8th, 1913, by the Emperor himself, had a price tag of 2.25 million Reichsmark. "The structure was opened with almost religious fervour and military pomp", The New York Times recorded. The Games themselves should have cost 1.3 million Reichsmark.
For Germany's sports authorities, the chance to stage the Games was a big chance to get the upper hand over the Gymnastics Association ("Deutsche Turnerschaft"), a powerful, nationalistic and partly anti-semitic opponent in the struggle for supremacy in the country's sports scene. When Berlin was awarded the 1916 Olympics in July 1912, Crown Prince Wilhelm took over patronage for the Organising Comittee. The organisers even planned to stage the first winter sports events in the history of the Games at the Feldberg, deep in Black Forest (picture: Hoffotograf Franz Schilling).
But the Olympic dream evaporated in the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out.
On March 16th, 1916, the German Stadium was the scene for "Patriotic Games", including military marching, running over obstacles, and throwing hand grenades. The Olympic Spirit had gone long before. Ferdinand Goetz, leader of the "Deutsche Turnschaft", in 1914 had already scorned that he could not image "to give a friendly reception to all the enemies, the English, the Belgians, the French and the Russians coming to Berlin".
It was a kind of swan song for the1916 Olympics - and a premonition of discussions to come 20 years later. By then, the "German Stadium" had given way for Hitler's "Reichssportfeld" and the brand new Olympic Stadium.
