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