Olympics of the past: Winning medals wasn’t serious

A few days ago, I was preparing for an online session with some of our Olympics-bound athletes on matters outside the playing arena. And some of the work put in by the research team from the Go Sports Foundation was staggering. Stadium and Olympic Village plans, the type of food available, how to use Google Translate and other useful apps, and a host of other minute details, all designed to make their lives easier.One section included a complete walk-through a typical Japanese washroom, most of which have a series of buttons for the most exotic of functions. It was an extremely useful exercise, given that top-end Japanese loos literally require an instruction manual, and the last thing you needed a potential medal prospect to worry about during an event was which button to press to clean her bottom.The kind of detail that athletes and their teams preparing for the Olympics nowadays go into is staggering. And it is actually justified. If you think about it, it’s literally one chance in four years where a few millimetres to one side in a sport like shooting or archery could cost a medal. In fact, many shooters and archers even carry pillows, so that their neck position remains the same, and they don’t get a crick from an unfamiliar pillow.It wasn’t always that serious though. When the modern Olympic Games started in 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin laid far more stress on the spirit of participation rather than the actual competition. Professionals were strictly barred, and it was all about playing the game the right way. They even had medals for architecture, music, painting and sculpture.Interestingly, if they felt none of the participants deserved a gold medal, they would just award a silver or a bronze medal — and quite often, no medal at all. Among the winners was 73-year-old artist John Copley and Coubertin himself, who participated in the ‘mixed literature’ competition under a pseudonym and won a gold medal in 1912.Even the physical sports were competed in a more relaxed manner. Brothers John and Sumner Paine were among the first US athletes to win at the 1896 Olympics, winning gold and silver in the 30m and 25m pistol events. They did it while sipping whisky from their flasks to steady their nerves. By the next day, all the other shooters started following suit.In the 1900 games, Danish journalist Edgar Aaybe was covering the Games for the Politiken newspaper, when one of the members of the Danish tug-of-war team got injured. Edgar was asked to step in, and the 34-year-old ended up winning an Olympic gold medal. That night, he must have really enjoyed filing his story.Perhaps the man who embodied the perfect Olympic spirit was Frenchman George Touquet-Daunis. The 1900 Olympic marathon involved a circuitous course that went straight through the middle of Paris with the runners struggling between automobiles, animals, bicycles, pedestrians, and people generally just joining in for fun. The race was run at 2.30 in the afternoon in July. Thirteen runners started the race. Seven finished. Touquet-Daunis, our hero, was leading — till he ran into a café to escape the heat, had a couple of beers, and then decided it was too hot to continue.What is a medal worth? Remember, Sumner Paine, our whisky-swilling Olympic shooter. Five years after his Olympic triumph, he came home to find his wife in bed with another man. He fired four shots at him from his pistol and was soon arrested, jailed and charged with assault. Paine was finally released when the police found out about his Olympic medal and realised that he must have missed on purpose.I think Coubertin would have approved.(The writer is former project director, 2017 Fifa Under-17 World Cup)

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3yGZL1C