By Alex Gillett and Kevin Tennent
What was the British contribution to the development of the Olympic Games as an institution in the nineteenth and early twentieth century?
The 18th century concept of a ‘Grand Tour’ to Europe awakened a new interest in classical Greece and Rome, revitalising the concept of the ancient Olympic games as a show of physical strength and prowess. This came together with the developing educational ideology of muscular Christianity in the mid-19th century, originating from the playing fields of England’s public schools, stressing the physical as well as mental development of the young men who would enter public life. These men moved into employment in a range of professional and clerical roles, from the military to banking, bringing such values to bear on the organisation of amateur sport, which in time became a regularised system for competition. Sport was cleaned up, to be pursued by amateurs for its own sake, with betting and monetary prizes banned, although this did not prevent managerial values from entering the system in terms of governance.
This structure and moralising ethos partly inspired the Frenchman Baron de Coubertin to form the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1892. Our book expands on existing knowledge of this early history of the modern Olympics, demonstrating how British involvement included building and reinforcing what became known as ‘the classic Olympic system’ (Chappalet, 2023, p. 785-786). This was a structure of interlocking distributed responsibility based on the collaboration of the Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games, National Olympic Committees (NOCs), and National and International Sports federations. Each games would have its own local organising committee, while each sport would have national and later international governing bodies, and each country its own Olympic committee which drew these bodies together. For instance, in England soccer had the Football Association as a national governing body, then FIFA established in 1904 as an international governing body, but there was also a British Olympic Association, established in 1905, which represented the interests of all British Olympic sports to the IOC. This interlocking structure of cooperation started to establish itself in the mid-1900s. We end the book with the Intercalated Games in Athens in 1906, just before the British hosted the games in London in 1908. (We will be covering this in a future volume.)
Photo: Brown University Library https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:87164/
The early Olympiads were ambitious projects which aimed to serve as pacifist meeting places for young people from a range of nations. From the start they attempted to emulate the industrial World’s Fair, or exposition movement, building on a nineteenth century tradition of entertainment based on the grand spectacle involving technological novelty which we summarise as ‘technotainment’. Governments, including the British, sponsored official pavilions to demonstrate national industries, fostering a sense of peaceful international competition. Sideshows including rides and displays of colonized peoples entertained the public. The 1900 (Paris) and 1904 (St. Louis) Olympiads took place alongside World’s Fair events which helped to finance them. The first Olympics in Athens in 1896 was a free-standing event which caught the public imagination throughout Europe, including in the UK, but proved expensive to host. The ancient stadium was refurbished at great cost, and a new velodrome constructed. Running parallel to World’s Fairs allowed the fledgling amateur sporting movement to grow while accumulating legitimacy through fostering more visual international competition on the sports field.
Photo: Public Domain
Our book is the first to explore the British contribution to the rise of the modern Olympics and place it in historical context. Despite involving the wealthiest European and North American nations, the games did not evolve in a linear fashion and the events and participation in them were often inconsistent. For instance, the 1900 Paris games were not officially advertised as an Olympic games at the time, while for cost and organisational reasons the British missed competing in St Louis in 1904. The organization of multi-sport tournaments involving unpaid athletes with only steam trains, shipping, post and telegraph as the available transport and communication technologies was an impressive undertaking, but could also prove a barrier to participation. Britain’s amateur sporting enthusiasts collaborated with those of other countries and contributed with aplomb. In contrast to those from continental Europe, British athletes self-organised and participated without government funding or sponsorship until the post-1945 period. The transformation of ad hoc offshoots of World’s Fairs into the global megaprojects of today involved a host of managerial, organisational, and institutional innovations, creating structures that continue to have a meaning which resonates in the twenty-first century.