In 2020, the return to “normality” has been a constant theme in sport. After the international Olympic Committee (IIC) Executive Board assembly last week, President Thomas Bach was confident that the Olympic Games would be held next year.
“Great progress has been made in adapting these Olympic Games to the post-crown world. This makes the creation committee and IAO very confident,” Bach said.
“We are also looking at examples in Japan that major occasions can take place even now under existing restrictions.
“We have also noticed that a number of foreign events are held, including world championships, which can also give japanese confidence in preparations. We can also inspire Japanese who have doubts about having confidence in their own effectiveness.
Seventy-five years ago, the world aspired to normalcy in the game for other reasons. World War II violated the basic norms of humanity.
In the last year of the war, Felix Flatow, a two-time gold medalist in gymnastics for Germany at the 1896 Olympics, died in a concentration camp where he had been imprisoned for being Jewish.
Eric Liddell of Scotland, the 400-meter champion in 1924, had worked as a missionary in China, died in an internment camp.
Ferenc Csik, the Hungarian 100-meter freestyle champion in 1936, was killed in an airstrike while running as an army doctor.
His compatriot, the 1928 fencing gold medalist, Junos Garay, died in a concentration camp five days before the end of the war.
Even after the end, German water polo gold medalist Emile Benecke died in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Riga.
Japan only took a position when atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A few days later, the IIC Executive Committee met in London.
ICO Vice President Sigfrid Edstrom arrived from Sweden and Avery Brundage traveled from the United States to enroll in Lord Aberdare in London.
Count Alberto Bonacossa had not been able to do so from Italy and Marquis Melchior de Polignac was still in France.
However, it is the first official assembly of IIC members in nearly six years.
IIC President Henri Baillet-Latour died in 1942 when Belgium was under Nazi occupation.
He reported that he “took note of IIC activity” from his home in Sweden.
A general election had increased the American Avery Brundage to that of vice president.
More importantly, the IIC also deserves to take place at the 1948 Games.
“Because the preparation time was very short and the means were very difficult lately, the decision was taken not to convene an IAO assembly at this time to postpone the assembly until September 1946. “
The host cities of the 1948 Summer and Winter Games were “chosen by vote by mail”.
The list of imaginable includes many United States, but “after careful consideration,” the IAO sent election documents with strong St Moritz’s advice for the Winter and London Games for the summer. The organization also inspected Wembley Stadium, a possible Olympic headquarters.
Edstrom said ICO assets amounted to about 28,000 Swiss francs. At that time, members still had to fund their own and pay for a normal subscription.
The Executive Committee was responsible for locating “new men with an active interest in the game and adequate qualifications as members of the IIC”.
Italian Giorgio Vaccaro, one of the existing members, may have simply given up. He became a member of the IIC in 1939. He was strongly connected to benito Mussolini’s fascists, but showed no preference for doing what is decent.
In fact, the IAO encouraged the emergence of a new generation of sports stars.
Five thousand men, many of them uniformed, gathered at Madison Square Garden to watch ice skating in early 1945.
Canadian champion Barbara Ann Scott, 16, won American women’s singles “with functionality as transparent and showy as the snowy heights of her Canadian homeland.
Dick Button, 15, representative of the Philadelphia Skating and Humane Society, the youth competition, both Olympic gold in 1948.
In February, Sugar Ray Robinson fought “Furious Bull” Jake LaMotta. It was his fourth assembly of six.
The Ring, an American boxing magazine of great reputation, said the match “behaved like the singles circle of rivalry. “
Robinson won over issues and the couple faced off in September in what The Ring described as “Battle V. “
Once again, Sugar Ray won over issues after “the boxer and the hitter exchanged their momentum for 12 rounds. “
La Motta later observed: “I’ve fought it so it’s wonderful not to have contracted diabetes.
The Boston Marathon continued uninterrupted and in 1945 the winner was the remarkable Johnny “The Elder” Kelley. An Olympian on both sides of the war has raced in Boston no less than 61 times, the last of his 85 years.
The Stanley Ice Hockey Cup also continued their sequence: in the 1945 final, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who took the three-game lead over the Detroit Red Wings, claimed victory, but only after the seven most sensible series were separated.
In the maker, Walter “Babe” Pratt scored the winner.
Byron Nelson had won four primary tournaments before the war, in 1945, as if he had never left. He has won 19 of the 31 tournaments in which he has participated.
During the war, football continued in many countries, Nazi Germany.
After the war, permission was granted for a regional festival in southern Germany.
The year 1946 would normally have been a World Cup, but this was impossible, gradually the national leagues were restarted and foreign football resumed.
In Argentina, River Plate won the League of Striker championship of rival Bonaerense Boca Junior. That season, a teenager named Alfredo Di Stéfano debuted with River. In a decade, many others will know his call at Real Madrid.
In Italy, Torino won Serie A. They ruled club football until the Superga air crisis wiped out his entire team in 1949.
The West had allied with Soviet Russia during the war. In November 1945, Dynamo Moscow toured Britain in goodwill. The club was a member of the “People’s Commissioner for the Interior” or NKVD, the precursor to the KGB.
Secret cops or not, his taste for the game turned out to be a revelation and he was known as “Passovotchka”.
Officially, 74,496 saw Dynamo tie 3-3 against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, but actual attendance is likely to be much higher.
In Cardiff, the Russians won miniature miners’ lamps through Cardiff City players.
They responded with a 10-1 win that news from the film “football sensation of the year”.
Prior to Dynamo’s assembly, Arsenal strengthened their squad with England internationals Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen. “The composition of the published English national team differs significantly from that of Arsenal that had been announced before,” the Russians observed before winning 4-3 on an adjustment play. in a thick fog.
In Glasgow, 90,000 people were overwhelmed to see the Russians serenade with bagpipes before the Rangers’ 2-2 draw.
Rugby was strictly amateur at the time, but restrictions were easy in wartime. On the first day of 1945, the British army faced a French XV in Paris. The army included professional rugby league star Gus Risman.
The international “Victoria” was played the year. The Royal New Zealand Air Force XV overcame South African facilities in Richmond.
In April, the French arrived in Britain, where they lost to a British Empire in Richmond.
The official Five Nations championship resumed until 1947, when the old rules on amateurism were also restored.
Cricket had played a vital role in the summers of war.
In 1945, Sir Pelham Warner of the Marylebone Cricket Club contributed to an excursion by the Australian Armed Forces team, which has expanded to include a series of ‘victory tests’.
Australian Prime Minister John Curtin sent a message: “I make my warmest wishes to English cricket bigger. I would appreciate it if you would convey to the respective captains your sincere desire to reopen a series that I hope will never be interrupted again. .
Just name maybe, the series of five drawn games.
There is also an adjustment between England and 11 combined “Dominions”, driven through the wonderful Learie Constantine of the West Indies.
Warner described this as “cricket in excelsis. “
First-class cricket resumed in Australia in November.
In impartial Sweden, athletics was not interrupted and in July 1945, Swede Gunder Hgg lowered the world mile record set through compatriot Arne Andersson at an assembly in Malmo.
“Running in an almost tropical heat, the two Swedish rivals matched step by step on Malmo’s fast track,” the news firm said.
It has been described in the New York Times as the ‘Swedish swifty’.
On the last day of September, Finn Viljo Heino broke the one-hour record of 19,339 kilometers in Turku, beating the record of his illustrious compatriot Paavo Nurmi.
The game was welcomed with open arms in the postwar years, when enthusiasts were returning by the millions.
The absence of spectators is arguably the biggest difference in 2020.
Philip Barker, a freelance journalist, was part of the editorial team of the Journal of Olympic History and is credited with having turned the publication into one of the most reputable old publications on the history of the Olympic Games. He is also an expert in Olympic music, a box that is overlooked.
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The 1928 Amsterdam Olympics marked a number of vital milestones, but what we all enjoy today is the car parking revolution. Like other European cities in the last 1920s, the streets of Amsterdam were temporarily filled with cars, and the Games, this challenge was more urgent than ever, so organizers were forced to seek a solution. The assigned parking next to the Olympic Stadium can accommodate up to 2,000 cars, which was far from enough to meet the call. In response, the City Council provided a number of other sites that allowed up to 3500 cars and 2000 bicycles to be parked, but as soon as one challenge was resolved, another one was created: how were drivers and cyclists intended to be located?On the way to the new car parks? A solution was discovered in the form of small blue panels with a white capital “P” in the middle. This is how the outdoor parking sign was born.
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