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The Olympic Games were founded in 776 B.C. Empires Special: The Greeks: Crucible of Civilisation: Revolution, PBS 2000
Greece’s most notorious public expenditure bonanza was on the 2004 Olympic Games ... Buildings and facilities lie unused ... The financial fiasco of the Athens Olympics. Michael Portillo’s Great Euro Crisis, BBC 2012
Games? I’ve seen better organised riots. Chariots of Fire 1981 starring Ben Cross & Ian Charleson & Nicholas Farrell & Nigel Havers & Ian Holm & John Gielgud & Lindsay Anderson & Alice Kruge & Stuan Rodger & Nigel Davenport & Patrick Magee & David Yelland et al, director Hugh Hudson, Sam at Scottish games with Eric
The summer of 1936 and the world was coming to Berlin ... Germany won 89 Olympic medals – more than any other nation. The United States ranked second, with a total of 56. Third Reich: The Rise I, History 2010
A festival of peoples, so it seemed. Hitler was angered by the German crowd’s enthusiasm for black athletes. Hitler: A Profile, SBS 1995
As a child Jesse Owens raced other kids form his Cleveland neighbourhood on city sidewalks. He was the youngest of ten children. Jesse Owens, PBS 2012
Joseph Goebbels planned to use the Games to the Nazis’ advantage. ibid.
As a movement for a boycott grew, the NAACP convinced Owens to take a public stand. ibid.
Thousands of German fans knew they were witnessing something extraordinary. ibid.
By the fourth day of the Games Goebbels was enraged. ibid.
The team’s only two Jewish sprinters ... would be replaced by Owens and Metcalf. ibid.
He was far from triumphant. ibid.
The lucrative offers that had poured into Berlin turned out to be empty promises. ibid.
The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads – in the end – to the best within us. Jesse Owens
Utterly dominating his sport for years, collecting multiple Olympic and World Championship golds, setting thirty-five world records. Sporting Greats – Sergey Bubka, Sky Sports 2012
In 1988 in Seoul, Bubka would get his Olympic chance. ibid.
Los Angeles 1984: 4 Olympic gold medals. Sporting Greats – Carl Lewis
1988 Johnson v Lewis. ibid.
200m v [Joe] DeLoach ... The only Olympic sprint title Carl Lewis would lose. ibid.
In Barcelona in 1992 he won gold in the long jump for a third successive time. ibid.
1996 Olympics in Atlanta ... Carl Lewis won the long jump for an incredible fourth time. ibid.
One man combined these attributes better than any other athlete in the history of the intermediate hurdles. For almost a decade Edwin Moses reigned supreme; for almost a decade he never lost a race. Sporting Greats – Ed Moses
He became one of the stars of Montreal. That potential was realised in the Olympic final: 47.65 world record. ibid.
The vigorous training regime worked; Moses smashed the world record in the 1976 Olympics and twice more in ’77 and ’80. He broke it again for a final time in ’83: 47.01. ibid.
An athlete whose influence transcends his chosen sport. Sporting Greats – Michael Johnson
1996 Atlanta: 200m 19.32 & 400m & 4x400 relay. ibid.
2000 Sydney: 400m 43.85; 4x400m – but when his team-mates failed drugs tests he chose to return what he saw was a tainted gold. ibid.
And no gymnast has achieved that perfection more than Romania’s Nadia Comaneci. In the 1976 Olympics she became the first girl to score a perfect ten. She won five Olympic golds, and is the only woman to have won three European Championships. Sporting Greats: Nadia Comaneci
At 14 she would go to the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. ibid.
An Olympic Legend: Winner of Five Consecutive Olympic Rowing Gold Medals 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000. Sporting Greats: Steve Redgrave, plaque
Just invincible on that day. Sporting Greats: Jesse Owens, sports writer
Ultimately, the anti-boycott forces prevailed. ibid.
The AAU decided Jesse Owens was finished as an athlete. ibid.
As a 10 year old I had 17 national age-group records. Sporting Greats: Mark Spitz
1968: A four-medal flop … two gold medals, a silver, a bronze. ibid.
1972: The first day I would get two gold medals. ibid.
Seven gold medals and seven world records. ibid.
The urine sample of Ben Johnson, Canada, Athletics 100 metre, collected on Saturday 24th September 1988, was found to contain the metabolic of a banned substance namely Stanozolol. Olympic doping committee televised announcement
The Olympic Games are coming to Sydney in the millennium year 2000. While the official Olympic song celebrates Baron de Coubertin’s vision of ‘a festival of sports creating international respect and goodwill’, it is the smell of money that comes with the salt spray; for Arcadia is also Spiv City.
That is to say, the rich mates who run what they call the big end of town know that the Olympics have little to do with peace, goodwill, etc. and everything to do with power, rivalry, status and the top dollar. The shock troops of the Sydney Olympic Committee understood this and left the bidders from Beijing and Manchester in their dust.
Every African delegate on the International Olympic Committee was offered two seven-year scholarships for their country’s athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport. A world youth soccer tournament costing A$35 million (£13.5 million?), much of it public money, was slipped under the table. That the president of the Federation of International Football Associations happened to be one of the most influential IOC brokers was an amazing coincidence. The fascist past of the IOC’s Spanish president, Juan Samaranch, rated hardly a word in the Sydney press; instead, his campaign for a Nobel peace prize was noted favourably. ‘Anyone who threatens Sydney’s Olympic bid had better watch out,’ bellowed a member of the Sydney committee.
... Behind the facade, nothing has changed for the first Australians. Their life expectancy is at least 25 years less than that of whites; walk through any Aboriginal cemetery and you see that most of the graves belong to the young. Australia is the only developed country on a World Health Organisation ‘shame list’ of countries where endemic trachoma still blinds children. Unlike Sri Lanka, rich Australia has yet to marshal its energies to beat this entirely preventable disease.
Although representing less than 3 per cent of the population, Aborigines fill the lock-ups and prisons. In the Northern Territory, one dies in custody every two weeks – a rate said to be higher than the death of imprisoned blacks in apartheid South Africa. This, as they say here, is ‘a tricky subject’. The newly appointed sports and tourism minister, a woman called Jackie Kelly with a reputed gift for public relations, refused to be interviewed on the subject. Rather, her media adviser refused. ‘The minister has to be protected,’ he said privately.