London’s 1948 Olympics

Here come the Olympics! Are you ready? Is London ready? This is the British capital’s third time hosting the summer Games. This first, in 1908, occurred seventeen years before The New Yorker came into existence, but the second, in 1948, was well covered in our pages. Our longtime London correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downes, filed a pair of reports on the Olympiad, which came after a twelve-year hiatus because of the Second World War. Her first dispatch discussed the buildup to the Games and the initially tepid embrace of the event by the citizens of Great Britain. In comparison to the spectacle promised for this weekend’s opening ceremonies, the 1948 Olympics, which took place amid postwar rationing, were, in Panter-Downes’s words, “Spartan as well as Greek.” Some athletes were housed in old R.A.F. barracks and there were “no frills” on the Olympic Stadium. With the blockade of Berlin having begun in June of that year, the simmering hostilities of the Cold War were on everyone’s mind. (Germany and Japan were not invited; the Soviet Union did not attend.) Inevitably, so was the weather:

At one dismal moment, it looked as though the British, depressed by new war talk and a summer like a nice, mild winter, were going to close their purses as well as their minds to the games. The blocks of seats unexpectedly returned by competing countries who also felt that the news was scaring (the United States sent the biggest lot) did not sell so well until a gasping heat wave suddenly spread a brassy blue sky over London and people trooped to Wembley to stand in damp queues for tickets to the track, boxing, and swimming events. By opening day, popular interest had about reached the pitch that the promoters had expected all along.

This late-blooming exuberance on the part of the host nation carried through the Games themselves, as Panter-Downes reported a week later in her second London letter: “After a few days nothing seemed to matter in the dreamy world of the Olympics but the split-second difference by which someone managed to hurl himself through the air or to touch his foot to a painted line quicker than anyone else.” The weather, however, turned for the worse:

While what were merrily termed “heats” were being run off, competitors who were waiting their turn sat on the grass huddled in blankets, like rows of small wigwams. In the cheaper uncovered seats, umbrellas sprouted for the frequent chill showers as the world’s crack sprinters splashed to victory through puddles as prosaically as shopping crowds plodding about on a rainy day.

For a number of athletes, the Games were also dampened by what Panter-Downes called “Europe’s fiscal problems.”

The Austrians, for instance, had to return home after competing in their particular events, in order to save the cash it would take to wait around and see the end of the games. Any day at Wembley, disconsolate Finns can be seen standing about outside the swimming pool hawking tickets for blocks of seats their teams bought before the Finnish government limited the amount of currency it would allow to be used for transporting people to England.

Let’s hope that the athletes in the current Games, which are also taking place amid a European financial crisis, do not have to resort to such desperate measures as scalping tickets.

_The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.

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Illustration by Abe Birnbaum.