Hitler's Olympics (15 page)

In Berlin a ‘Laughter Week’ ordered ‘jollity and cheerfulness’ to help the citizenry prepare for the rigours of the Games. They were instructed to wear friendly faces for all the Olympic guests due any moment now.

From the
Manhattan
Wykoff wrote a letter to Frederick Graham, sports editor of his local paper, the
News-Press
, in Glendale, California expressing thanks for all he had done. He said that thus far everything had been perfect and added, delightfully, a request to be forgiven for the state of his handwriting: he was not, he insisted, drunk; it was the result of the motion of the
Manhattan
.

Later that day others were to be much less sober than Wykoff. Eleanor Holm discovered the ease of moving between the classes on the ship and found a bar in First Class on A Deck, a haunt of reporters, which suited her. She fell in with a journalist and playwright who, recently remarried, was escaping a feud with his first wife. He liked a drink, she liked a drink, journalists like a drink and they had a party that Friday night. One report suggests the owner of the ship invited her and it began as a cocktail party.
⁶⁸
At one point someone approached her at the bar, where she was drinking champagne, and said she really ought to go to bed. ‘Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team, or did I?’ The party lasted until 6 a.m. when Holm was seen being carried back to her cabin.

This became one of the biggest stories of the whole Games and Velma Dunn gives it some perspective.

[Holm] was from Los Angeles and she trained at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, so did I and she was one of the most generous persons I have ever known for giving her time and helping others. Let’s say somebody was a backstroker. If they were there for practice and having a bit of trouble with their stroke or something she would spend her time helping them. She was very good looking in a provocative way. That would be fair to say. Sexy, that’s right.

You have to remember she was married at the time and she was a nightclub singer. Part of her life was singing and drinking and many of her friends were on the ship same as we were, except that they were up in First Class. She thought nothing of going up to First Class at night and being with her friends. That wasn’t my life! I’d never done that! But it was her regular life. I think that to anybody working in a nightclub liking a drink would be part of it.

If she had competed it was a kind of foregone conclusion she would have won a gold medal because she was just an excellent swimmer. She was a natural swimmer. Many of us had to work for whatever we got.
⁶⁹

Holm was not alone in flouting the team rules about training and curfews; members of the hockey and fencing squads drank and stayed up late, too.

The American Olympic Committee members on the ship faced a crisis. Failure to act would likely lead to a breakdown of discipline and a minority wanted the offenders removed from the team immediately. Instead, warnings were issued that anyone offending again would be put ashore at Cobh. At this stage no competitors were named although subsequently Brundage confirmed he had offered Holm a second and final chance.

Brundage comprehended the difficulty of having a rigid set of rules for the conduct of so many competitors, ranging in age from thirteen to forty. ‘We are making all reasonable allowances. We are not prudish nor do we have any objection to a glass of beer or smoking by athletes who know how to behave generally and not disrupt the team’s morale and discipline. Now it’s up to the members of the team to show they mean business.’

In the Olympic Village, with so many athletes already arrived, training schedules caused problems because the time for each team’s squads at the stadium and pool had to be limited. At least the weather improved, the cold and damp giving way to something like a heatwave. The South Americans, so unused to the cold, welcomed this although the Peruvian team suffered problems acclimatising from the altitude of home. They caught colds and tonsillitis.

The Japanese continued to be secretive and inscrutable. Their football team scaled the perimeter fence of the Village at 4 a.m. one morning to practise on a pitch a mile away.

India would play eight practice hockey matches before the competition proper began, but they lost the first of them 4–1 to a German select team. The contrast in styles was marked, the Germans direct and robust, the Indians relying on ‘short passes, dribbling and planned movement’. The Indians consoled themselves with the thought that although the Germans were strong, they had time to improve.
⁷⁰

On Saturday 18 July the competitors on the
Manhattan
attended the Captain’s Ball, a lively occasion which seems to have pleased those who went. The athletes behaved impeccably so that, as a reward, the 10 p.m. curfew was extended to midnight. Brundage said publicly the matter of the rule breakers was closed.

Eleanor Holm did not say anything publicly – yet.

Sometime during the voyage – perhaps this Saturday, perhaps the day after – the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Athletic Union mentioned to a gathering of athletes plans for a post-Olympic tour. With so much already on their minds they almost certainly did not understand the significance of this and, anyway, with each day bringing them nearer Berlin, who could conceivably be looking beyond the Games?

On Sunday 19 July, as the
Manhattan
finally drew towards the Irish coast the athletes were doing light training. Some attended church services.

Owens had caught a cold bad enough to make him visit a doctor but by this fifth day he was feeling better, however much the shipboard confinement and routine bored him. He even slept one whole afternoon.
⁷¹

The day’s amateur hour parodied a well-known radio programme and shipboard fun featured a variety show in the evening with spoof weddings and funerals. Two boxers brought the house down with a dance routine, gymnasts yodelled and a female hurdler sang the blues. Eleanor Holm was no prude but certainly shrewd and, as she watched, she may well have concluded the spoof weddings provided her with ammunition.

The twin themes – politics raw in tooth and claw, the youth of the world preparing to play – flowed on. In Spain, General Franco arrived in Cadiz at the head of Spanish foreign legionaries, an event that highlighted a sad little footnote to the Berlin Olympics. Spain attempted to set up an alternative to the Nazi Games, in Barcelona, from this day to 26 July. Trade unions, communists and socialist parties from all over the world offered their backing. Free room and board were promised but competitors had to get there under their own steam. Apart from sport the programme included chess, musical and theatrical events. Teams from the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Italy did attend – almost exclusively communists in exile and socialists. The alternative Games did happen, however low key, and were even more subdued because with the Spanish Civil War tightening its grip on the country Republicans and Nationalists were exchanging fire all over Barcelona. Canadian boxers Luftspring and Yack intended to compete but when they reached Dieppe they heard they had been cancelled.

The workouts on the
Manhattan
’s hard deck damaged Stephens’s shins, requiring treatment and rest.

On Monday 20 July the Finns arrived at the Village and by now the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper
Der Stürmer
, its pages until then on dis- play in glass cases on street corners all over Berlin, had disappeared. Rumours suggested that Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry or even Hitler himself might have bought it to soften its tone or ordered it off the streets altogether. Some of the glass cases came down, others were being used for different publications.

The torch relay was due to start at noon at Olympia from the first Olympic stadium, among olive groves and pine trees and ruined temples. To ensure the torch’s smooth journey, nothing had been left to chance.

Certain delays had to be allowed for, and for this reason an additional two-hour period was inserted for each 80–100 kilometres, these intervals being utilised in the larger cities for special ceremonies. In the case of slight delays, such a programme could continue until the runner arrived with the Olympic Fire. In every case the runners had to depart punctually and the entire relay run had to be organised so that the final torch bearer would enter the Olympic Stadium [in Berlin] at the proper moment during the opening ceremony.
⁷²

The special ceremonies ‘constituted an effective introduction to the Olympic Games’.

A model programme was sent to each town to be used as a general basis for the ceremonies. This programme included the following events: arrival of the runner, ignition of the Olympic Fire, singing of the hymn, ‘Burn, Olympic Flame,’ address by the Mayor, general singing, gymnastic exercises by the men, women and children, sporting demonstrations, singing of the Olympic Hymn, festive address dealing with the Olympic Games, folk dancing, folk songs, preparation for the departure of the next runner, words of consecration, singing of the national anthem, departure of the runner, pealing of the bells. Outlines for the address were also prepared in various languages.
⁷³

Beyond this, the National Committees could make whatever arrangements they wanted for these ceremonies.

While the whole world watched, the German Organising Committee felt that each of the 3,075 runners believed they were a living expression of the Olympic ideals, each would understand the symbolic importance of it, and each feel the link between ancient and modern.

At Olympia, buglers welcomed the day and dignitaries from all over Greece gathered. Thirteen Greek maidens ‘in short, belted smocks of rough serge’ supposedly resembling robes worn by ancient priestesses, entered the stadium through a covered passageway.
⁷⁴
A magnifying glass, positioned on a stand, refracted sunlight creating a fire into which one of the maidens dipped her torch. In procession, the other maidens followed her to a Fire Altar outside the stadium where the dignitaries and the first runner, Kyril Kondylis, waited. She lit the fire on the altar.

The German Chargé d’Affaires watched, as did a crew from the German Broadcasting Company, journalists from far and wide, and film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. A favourite of Hitler and already well known for recording a Nuremberg rally, she was embarking on a lavish documentary of the whole Games. The local mayor and a Greek government representative spoke, a message from de Coubertin was read. It praised the relay run and requested the ‘youth assembled in Berlin accept the heritage of my work – that the bond between the physical and intellectual forces may be sealed eternally for the progress and honour of humanity’. A gun was fired and ancient instruments accompanied a hymn.

As the moments ticked towards noon and reports reached the German Organising Committee that the run was generating mounting anticipation in all the countries and places through which it would pass, Kondylis, dressed in shoes and shorts, came forward and prepared for the solemn moment that would unite past, present and future.

The broadcasting crew preparing to cover the moment comprised three radio reporters, three engineers and three drivers. They had flown to Athens while a heavy cross-country transmitting car, adorned with the five Olympic rings, and a saloon car went by rail. Now microphones were set up.

At noon Berlin called.

Kondylis lit his torch from the altar.

In Berlin, the loudspeakers relayed the commentary from the transmitting car into the crowd that had gathered in the broad square in front of the town hall.

Kondylis turned and set off on the first of thirty-seven handovers to a place called Pont Ladon. The relay would pass through there at 3.15 p.m., and so on through fifty handovers to a place called Vytina, and with each footfall the sense of anticipation increased. The radio crew departed immediately for Athens and from then the supply of hourly bulletins heightened the excitement.

The Greek route was prepared in a most thorough manner. The runners were conveyed to their posts in motor-coaches, and those who had completed their stretch were collected by a following car. At other times an automobile preceded them, depositing the fresh bearers at their posts and taking in those who had completed their stretch. This system was used wherever changes had to be made on the highways or in streaming rain so that the runners would not have to wait in the open. Since sporting clubs existed only in the larger cities, peasant youths from the districts through which the Fire passed were usually enlisted as torch bearers. They had enrolled in the lists circulated by the Greek Olympic Committee and ran in their national costumes, which included the short, full skirt or ‘fustanella’.
⁷⁵

The broadcasting crew faced difficulties because Greece had no radio network to plug into. More than that, the crew recorded their broadcasts onto disks for posterity and the temperature began rising towards 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The disks became so soft the recording needle cut into them. In all the laboured, seemingly meticulous planning and rehearsing, the consequences of the fierce heat of a Greek summer, had been overlooked. The crew stepped outside the box: they used their initiative and poured their drinking water over the disks to keep them cool. It worked, just the way forward planning sometimes doesn’t and human initiative usually does.

The
Manhattan
kept on coming.

Notes

 
1
.
 
John Thomas Lang (1876–1975) was a prominent Australian politician during the early twentieth century. He was a member of the Australian Labor Party, and the Premier of New South Wales for two terms, from 1925 to 1927, and again from 1930 to 1932. He is the only Premier of any Australian state to have been dismissed by the State Governor (the representative of the British monarch) without there being an election or parliamentary vote of no confidence. This was due to his refusal to pay interest on government loans borrowed from financiers in the United Kingdom at the height of the Great Depression.