Life After Full-time Work Blog

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#218 I Love The Summer Olympic Games

68 years and counting …

 

Yes, if I had dictatorial powers there are many aspects of the summer Games that I would change. Never mind which ones, that’s not my point. Despite the negatives and the imperfections, it’s the positive aspects that have created and sustained my 68-year (so far) love affair with the Olympics. And the love is so strong that I’m departing from my website’s theme and becoming totally self-indulgent for the next three blog posts. (So you’ve been warned: this is going to be totally personal.)

I have an excellent excuse too. There are health benefits that arise from writing about intensely positive experiences. Writing about my love for the summer Games will enable me to capture the incidents and moments that are strong in my memory, incidents and moments that are partly related to competition at the Games and partly to the personal and family experiences they created, so that in future years, when the fading in my memory grows, I’ll be able to remember them. And that’s in addition to the joy that I feel as I actually write this.

(Try it yourself some time. A large body of research supports the notion that this kind of writing and recollection improves your well-being.)

***

My earliest memories of any kind date back to being a 10-year-old growing up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. I had asthma as a kid, so to get me away from the air of Calcutta I was sent to a boarding school for nine months each year, near the Himalayan hillside resort of Darjeeling, for four years. It wasn’t till I was 10 that Calcutta meant home to me, and that I got to truly interact with and get to know my family.

Somehow I had started to follow sports in those boarding school years, and in Calcutta I discovered the British monthly magazine World Sports, which became my bible, with not only articles about many sports but also monthly records of athletic performances – so suddenly I found I could keep up with names that started to become familiar. That was in 1955. In 1956 the legendary British sprinter Harold Abrahams (gold medal in the 100 meters at the Paris 1924 Olympics, and then he became a journalist and then chairman of the Amateur Athletic Association) wrote a book about the Olympic Games 1896-1952, really a first collection of all the statistics about the finals of all the track and field events. (And that’s the main reason why the Olympics have, for me, implied only the summer Games, with athletics dominating all other forms of sport.)

My father discovered the book, and he asked my Uncle Vic, who went to the UK in 1956, to bring back a copy for me. I loved it! I studied it intently, and became obsessed with the history and the records it contained. And so, when the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 came along, I forecast (thanks to what I had learned month by month in World Sports) who I thought would win each track and field event in Melbourne, because that’s what Abrahams and other experts did in World Sports. And I created a huge scrapbook in which I recorded (from daily reports in Calcutta’s The Statesman newspaper, completing it from World Sports) all the results of the finals in the various events, including the times or distances of each finalist; and I added as many photographs as I could from The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine. Yes, that was a very thick scrapbook! I’d probably be embarrassed if I came across it today, but at the time it became my bible. (Actually, I think I still have it somewhere.)

The more so because the names were no longer entirely just names to me. The legendary Emil Zatopek, who won gold medals in Helsinki 1952 in the 5k and 10k events and then, entering his first marathon on a whim, won gold there too – well, he came to Calcutta shortly before the Melbourne 1956 Games to run a 5k, and of course my father and I were there to see him, and I vividly remember both the feeling of disbelief that I actually saw a reigning Olympic champion in the flesh (not just on the newsreels shown before the movies, in those pre-TV days, at least in India) and the confirmation that, when he ran, his face invariably contorted into a grimace.

And India were the reigning hockey champions, having won the gold medal at every Olympics since 1928 (five in a row, at that stage), so my father and I saw many games in the Calcutta hockey league featuring legends like Dhyan Chand at the age of 50 (long after he had led India to three successive Olympic golds) and KD Singh (colloquially called “Babu”) who captained the gold-medal team in 1952. We also saw prospective members of the national team selected to defend the gold medal in 1956. The captain, Balbir Singh, and Leslie Claudius were the players I particularly admired, and it was surreal to think that their familiar faces were among those who successfully defended the title and won gold in 1956.

To this day I remember the winners of most of the track and field events in 1956, and I also recall the coincidence that, in 1948 and 1952, the same athlete (Mal Whitfield) won the men’s 800 meters, and both times he recorded the identical time of 1 minute 49.2 seconds. And I remember, from the Abrahams book, that Paavo Nurmi (the “flying Finn”) was the star of the 1924 Paris Games, winning five gold medals in four days (not all of those events still survive as part of the competition), and the Dutch star Fanny Blankers-Koen became the first female hero of a Games, winning four gold medals in London in 1948 (as a mother of two children!) – and she could have won more except for the then rule that limited a woman to three individual track and field events. (The Olympics have a long sexist history, some of which still survives.)

And then the abiding memory of those Melbourne Games. The context was that the world was filled with political strife (the Suez invasion, the Soviet invasion of Hungary); and so, in response to a suggestion by a young Australian, the athletes were included as part of the closing ceremony, athletes from all nations parading along the track circuit together, as if they were all from one nation, holding hands across countries, and bringing tears and prolonged applause from the spectators. Nothing could have better recalled the spirit of the original Olympics from many centuries ago, when wars were temporarily suspended so that athletes from opposing nations/states/cities could compete in peace.

Can you tell that my relationship with the summer Olympics had already become an obsession?!

***

I have a few memories of the Rome 1960 summer Games: Wilma Rudolph (who had polio as a child) was the track star, with Herb Elliott and Rafer Johnson also dominant in their own events. And that was the Olympics in which Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) won a boxing gold medal. Oh, and India finally lost its hockey supremacy, losing in the final to Pakistan.

***

By the time Tokyo 1964 came along, I was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and could follow the Games in the UK late every evening on the one tiny TV set in the Junior Common Room, which was inevitably packed. So my friend Peter Dufton (who joined me in making those event-by-event forecasts) and I always arrived very early and sat right at the front of the crowd. I can’t remember why, but one evening I was unable to get there early, and so sneaked into the back of the jammed room, hoping at least to hear the commentary, even if I couldn’t see the TV screen. To my astonishment, someone recognized me at the back, and helped push me to the front, saying that my front-row chair had been left empty in the hope that I could attend, after all. I was tremendously touched by this act of spontaneous generosity – one of the best gifts I have ever been given. It still brings tears to my eyes.

My other memory of the 1964 Games is that one morning I decided I would go late to a lecture, since the BBC had announced that, after the morning news on the radio, they would give listeners the result of the 10k race. So I waited patiently, and finally heard the result, which (as I recall) was: “Ron Hill finished 18th.” What?! Who won, what was the time? Apparently those minor details were irrelevant. And that was the first time I realized that reports from the Games were aimed, not at fanatics like me, but at the abundant temporary fans whose main interest was how their own nation’s athletes performed – something that continues everywhere today.

***

I followed the summer Games regularly and with undiminished intensity every four years. Montreal 1976 is a particular memory, as our son David was born shortly before the Games, and I still have a photo of David on Grandpa John’s chest in front of the TV screen, David staring at John and John fast asleep. (And Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau’s infamous statement, as the costs of hosting the Olympics kept growing, that his Olympics could no more have a deficit than a man could have a baby. You can imagine some of the jokes that resulted. Drapeau later created Canada’s first lottery, to pay for the enormous deficit over time.)

Another that stands out was 1980 Moscow, for all the wrong reasons. As a political protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter led the initiative for almost half of the world’s countries to boycott the Games – what a stunning contrast with the unifying spirit of the original Olympics as well as Melbourne 1956! – resulting in hundreds of athletes being denied the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the Games, with the joy that brings, regardless of where they might finish in their event.

And, to illustrate exactly that point, I think of Barcelona 1992, when a British athlete, who was favored to win a medal in his track event, suddenly pulled up and stopped running and clutched his thigh, and then tried to limp along to the finish line anyway; and his father, who was in the stands, rushed down to the track and held his son up for support, as he hobbled to the finish, to the cheers and tears of the spectators. Truly memorable!

***

I had no idea how much more was to come, personally; because, in addition to all those memories, my own love of the Olympics was about to grow in a new dimension: I actually got to be there for Sydney 2000.

***

2 Comments


I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are being discussed here. Where relevant I draw on material from three sources: The Retirement Plan Solution (co-authored with Bob Collie and Matt Smith, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), my foreword to Someday Rich (by Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith, also published by Wiley, 2012), and my occasional column The Art of Investment in the FT Money supplement of The Financial Times, published in the UK. I am grateful to the other authors and to The Financial Times for permission to use the material here.


2 Responses to “#218 I Love The Summer Olympic Games”

  1. Richard Bruce Austin says:

    Don:

    Your passion, happiness and joy comes through loud and clear. It is, to adapt a phrase from another context, “the white space between the lines”.

    Your self-indulgence brings pleasure to us all.

    We will look forward to the coming weeks.

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