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Why are there three lions on the shirts of the English football teams?
The three lions became a symbol of England thanks to 12th-century warmonger King Henry I who is popularly held to have been unable to speak a word of English himself...
Why are lions so closely aligned with the English national identity? Why are there three of them? And why do they grace the English football teams' shirts? The desultory answer to the football part is that the three lions are also the emblem of the Football Association, the sport's governing body in England. They have been part of strip since the first official international in 1872, when England played Scotland, ending in a 0-0 draw. Still, that doesn't explain where the FA got them from. Read more: 5 facts about the history of football Why are the three lions on the English football team shirt? The FA did not pick their big cats on a whim – a trio of lions has appeared on the arms of every English (and British) monarch since the late 12th century, and has been flown as a battle standard on English soil and abroad. The story is said to begin with King Henry I, whose arms were single golden lion, rampant (rearing on its hind legs) on a red field. He became a widower in 1118, and perhaps would have remained so had his sole male heir not died at sea in the White Ship disaster of 1120. Read more | How a forgotten law helped women’s football conquer the world – but only by accident The following year, he married Adeliza of Louvain. Her father also used a lion, and so Henry adapted his own arms to include two. Skipping a generation brings us to Henry II, who married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. Her family crest featured a lion as well. It took their son, Richard the Lionheart – a man who, in his entire reign, spent barely six months in England despite being born here – unite the three lions of his forebears into the national symbol it is today. We only know of his arms from two Great Seals, one of which bears the three lions passant-guardant (striding left but facing the observer). Every Plantagenet king used these arms unchanged, lions golden on a field of red, until the ascension of Edward III in 1327. Three lions on a shirt: the alternative explanation There is an alternative theory to why Richard opted for three lions – he simply wanted to show off that as well as being King of England, he was also lord and master of the Dukedom of Normandy and Aquitaine. The symbol of Normandy is two lions, and the symbol of Aquitaine one lion (you can see where this is going). Why are there roses as well as three lions on the England football shirt? The badge on the English football team's shirts bears another very English emblem, a smattering of ten Tudor roses, the propaganda device that symbolises Henry VII uniting the house of Lancaster and the house of York by marrying Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York after the Wars of the Roses. Read next: 1966 – how England lost, found and won the World Cup in a single year This article first appeared in BBC History Revealed
A brief history of American football and the Super Bowl
Super Bowl LVIII (58) will take place on 11 February 2024. How much do you know about the history of American football and the Super Bowl, the most watched television event of the year in the United States? Find out facts about the sport’s history, from the very first chaotic college matches, its deadly era in the early 1900s, to the reason the Super Bowl got its name…
American football – also known as ‘gridiron football’, for the vertical painted yard lines that run across the rectangular pitch – originated in North American colleges in the late 19th century, evolving from the British sports of rugby and association football (soccer). Early versions of the game were brutal and chaotic, often called ‘mob foot-ball’ by contemporaries, with a mix-and-match set of rules, large numbers of players per side and high injury rate. The match generally accepted as the first American football game took place in 1869, played between two north-eastern college teams, Princeton and Rutgers (Rutgers took the victory). The game would have been unrecognisable to today’s spectators, as the players weren’t allowed to pick up the ball. Instead, they advanced towards the scoring zone by kicking or swiping at it with their hands. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/FF972G-8e674e3-e1707391105647.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="An early college football scrimmage, c1905. Early versions of the game were brutal and chaotic, resulting in many injuries. (Image by Alamy)" title="An early college football scrimmage, c1905. Early versions of the game were brutal and chaotic, resulting in many injuries. (Image by Alamy)" /> Variations of the game were adopted by many north-eastern colleges of the era, and an early effort at standardisation was made when the first Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) was established in 1873. However a number of colleges retained their own rules, including Harvard College which preferred its ‘Boston Game’ (a ‘rugby-style’ with a mix of carrying and kicking the ball). Throughout the late 19th century, intercollegiate matches led to rules and styles being borrowed and swapped between institutions. It wasn’t until the 1880s that the game became more codified. Who invented American football? The man credited with managing the game’s evolution towards its modern form is Walter Camp (1859–1925), often known as the ‘father of American football’. It wasn’t until the 1880s that the game became more codified. Camp was a Yale undergraduate and medical student between 1876–81, and as well as playing halfback and serving as team captain, he became a key member of the second American Intercollegiate Football Association, which was reformed in 1876 and in existence until 1892. Under Camp’s direction, the IFA established common rules including the system of ‘downs’ (the need for the ball to be moved downfield a certain distance within an allotted number of attempts) and the number of players per side (11). Camp coached the Yale football team from 1888 through 1892, earning a remarkable 67 wins in 69 games – all while working as an executive at a watch-manufacturing firm. And Camp’s fame isn’t restricted to the football world; his athletic prowess and experience also meant he was approached by the US military during the First World War to create a new exercise programme to keep servicemen fit. Camp’s ‘Daily Dozen’, a set of 12 exercises, became an international phenomenon for both men and women and remained hugely popular into the 1920s and 30s. View oEmbed on the source website When did American football turn professional? The decades either side of the turn of the century saw the college game grow quickly; several rivalries that were formed in the era still hold today, including the Miami–Cincinnati battle for the Victory Bell trophy (first contested in 1888), and Arkansas–Louisiana battle for the Golden Boot (dating from 1901). A significant milestone for the game came in November 1892, when William ‘Pudge’ Heffelfinger was paid $500 to play a match for the Allegheny Athletic Association (though the payment was not revealed until 80 years later). Though other players may have been paid before this point, the AAA expense sheet is the first evidence of a documented cash payment – often referred to today as ‘pro football's birth certificate’ – and it marked the sport’s first step towards a professional era. The first fully professional game followed in September 1895, when the Pennsylvania-based teams Latrobe Athletic Association and Jeannette Athletic Club met. In 1897, the Latrobe Athletic Association paid all of its players for the whole season, becoming the first fully professional football team. Read more | The Boys in the Boat: the real history behind George Clooney’s underdog sports movie Though there was increased regulation, conditions for the players remained brutal; fractured ribs and limbs, and broken noses were the norm. In 1904 alone, reported the Chicago Tribune, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, and a further 19 deaths in the 1905 season. The toll was so significant it attracted the attentions of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who summoned college representatives to the White House in October 1905 and set in motion a period of reform – for instance, matches were shortened and forward passes were made legal. Remarkably, helmets didn’t become mandatory for college football players until 1939, and in the NFL until 1943. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/GettyImages-98327055-70b05eb-e1707389583110.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="A team portrait of the "M" football team, c1904. In the 1904 season alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries. (Sports Studio Photos/Getty Images)" title="A team portrait of the "M" football team, c1904. In the 1904 season alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries. (Sports Studio Photos/Getty Images)" /> When were the first American football leagues, and when was the NFL formed? The early years of the 20th century presented further challenges. During the First World War, there was a dearth of athletic men, which created bidding wars and steeply rising salaries as desirable players were sought across state lines. The need for regulated player transfers led to creation of the American Profession Football Association in 1920, though it changed its name to one many will recognise, the National Football League (NFL), in 1922. This early league saw much jostling for business; more than 40 different teams formed in the first dozen years, only to go out of business and drop out – though some familiar names remain. The Arizona Cardinals are the oldest surviving franchise, while Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers joined the league in 1921. (The Packers took their name from the Indian Packing Company, after their coach Curly Lambeau, a shipping clerk for the company, successfully asked the company's owner for money for jerseys and use of the company's athletic field in 1919.) Today, the NFL selection meeting, known as the ‘draft’, is a hugely competitive and anticipated event, a recruitment showcase for the new players available to the league. But it hasn’t always held the same prestige. During the first annual draft of college players, held in 1936, the first player to be selected, Jay Berwanger, chose to pursue a career in rubber and plastics manufacturing instead. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/GettyImages-515136556-ecb8907-e1707390282190.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Jay Berwanger, halfback of the University of Chicago. After being picked in the first NFL draft, Berwanger chose to pursue a career in plastics manufacturing. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)" title="Jay Berwanger, halfback of the University of Chicago. After being picked in the first NFL draft, Berwanger chose to pursue a career in plastics manufacturing. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)" /> When war came to the US once more in 1941, the league faced another struggle to survive. In 1943, Pennsylvania team the Pittsburgh Steelers (named after the city’s dominant steel industry) joined forces with state rivals Philadelphia Eagles (the franchise took its name from the eagle symbol on Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ that sought to promote economic recovery after the Great Depression). Both had been unable to field a complete team and, for one season, temporarily joined forces as the ‘Phil-Pitt Steagles’. Weathering the conflict, the NFL continued to grow. When a tense and torrid championship game in 1958 between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants – often called the ‘Greatest Game Ever Played’ – drew 45 million viewers on NBC, it was clear that the sport had firmly captured the attentions of the nation. Now entrenched in American society, and with huge financial potential, in the late 1950s the NFL was approached by several franchises to expand the league. When the NFL refused, a rival competition was formed: the American Football League (AFL). Read more | Did the football match Christmas truce really happen during WW1? When did the NFL and AFL merge? The AFL opened business in 1960 with eight franchises: Dallas Texans; Houston Oilers; Boston Patriots; Buffalo Bills; New York Titans; Oakland Raiders; Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Chargers. The league conducted its draft separately and began immediately competing on a financial level with the NFL, luring college players with substantially higher salaries. The NFL retained higher support but, as the AFL became more stable, the two leagues’ struggle for supremacy created a ‘civil war’ within the sport. On 8 June 1966, after a series of secret meetings, the rival leagues announced they would merge, and the winners of the two leagues would meet in a championship game at the end of the season, in January 1967. Initially known as the ‘AFL-NFL World Championship’, this annual meeting would become known as the ‘Super Bowl’. How did the Super Bowl get its name? According to Time Magazine, the names ‘Pro Bowl’ and ‘World Series of Football’ were both considered, before Lamar Hunt, a founder of the AFL and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, came up with the iconic name ‘Super Bowl’ – reportedly inspired by his son’s ‘Super Ball’ toy. Though an unofficial label during the competition’s first three years, it was finally adopted by the fourth Super Bowl fixture. Why are Roman numerals used for Super Bowl games? Another tradition applied retroactively was the use of Roman numerals to count the Super Bowl games, apparently (in the eyes of its founders) giving the fixture more “prestige” and “gravitas”. This also avoided the confusion of using different years for the league and championship game; for instance, the fourth championship game, played in January 1970 after the end 1969 league, became Super Bowl IV. The tradition has continued and this year’s Super Bowl, the 58th in the competition’s history, is Super Bowl LVIII. The only match to deviate from tradition was Super Bowl 50, which used the Arabic numeral that US audiences would find most familiar, in order to avoid confusion cause by the use of the solo letter ‘L’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/02/GettyImages-72494668-6a953b4-e1707390471771.jpg" width="619" height="412" alt="Players for the Denver Bronco players hold up the Lombardi Trophy after winning the Super Bowl XXXIII. (Image by Andy Lyons/Allsport/Getty Images)" title="Players for the Denver Bronco players hold up the Lombardi Trophy after winning the Super Bowl XXXIII. (Image by Andy Lyons/Allsport/Getty Images)" /> When was the first Super Bowl? The first Super Bowl was played on 15 January 1967, and saw the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Green Bay Packers at the Los Angeles Memorial Stadium in California – and despite the fixture’s huge popularity today, the first match didn’t even sell out. Who won the first Super Bowl? The Packers earned the win, under their coach Vince Lombardi (1913–70). Famed for his gruelling training regimes and high standards, Lombardi had joined the Packers in 1959 after the team’s worst losing season in its history. He went on to coach the team to three successive NFL Championships (between 1965–7) and victories in the first two Super Bowls. To this day, teams in the Super Bowl compete for the Lombardi trophy, renamed after the coach’s death in 1970. Video podcast | Britain's long love affair with sport The early success of Lombardi and the Packers did nothing to help the perception that the NFL was still the superior league. Many suggest that it wasn’t until Super Bowl III, when the AFL’s New York Jets shocked by taking victory over the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, that the game achieved better parity. There’s certainly no doubting the event’s prestige today; the Super Bowl is the premier sporting fixture of the year in the USA, and many of the matches rank among the most highly watched television events of all time. Read more about the history of sport
Oxford v Cambridge: A history of the boat race
Now an annual fixture in the sporting calendar, the boat race between Oxford and Cambridge draws the support of thousands along the river and the attention of millions of TV viewers each year. But how did it begin? More than 190 years after the first contest between the two universities, historian Mark Davies explores the origins and early years of the race…
Oxford v Cambridge. It is one of the most famous inter-varsity rivalries in the world. For centuries, the two universities have competed for academic excellence, but over the last two centuries or so, competitive sports have emerged as an adjunct, with none more keenly contested than the annual boat race. The intellectual jealousy stretches back to the early 13th century, when the many independent religious halls in Oxford combined to create the single university. The catalyst had been a particularly violent confrontation between the townspeople and the monks or clerks (that is, ‘scholars’ or ‘students’) in 1209, which had instigated a mass exodus. Some scholars never returned, finding a less antagonistic domicile on the banks of the River Cam. Those that did venture back to Oxford did so with the greater security of papal protection and new rights and privileges. Who had the idea for the first Boat Race? Oxford and Cambridge have competed for academic superiority almost ever since. However, it took more than 600 years for this rivalry to manifest itself in the sporting arena, the first such contest being a cricket match held in 1827. The first rowing race was held two years later. One man, Charles Wordsworth (1806–92), was instrumental in both. Wordsworth (the future Bishop of St Andrew’s and nephew of the poet William Wordsworth) had split loyalties; although he was an Oxford Christ Church student, his father was a Cambridge don. As a consequence, he spent the vacations in Cambridge, and, as Wordsworth relates in his autobiography Annals of my Early Life, the idea of a rowing race arose during 1827, while on the River Cam with an old Harrow schoolfriend, Charles Merivale (the future Dean of Ely). Merivale was studying at St John’s, which was at that time the best Cambridge college crew, or ‘Head of the River’ as they were called in both camps. Cambridge had something of a head start. The year of 1828 saw the founding of the Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC) and with it the first official inter-college races on the Cam. In Oxford, although the first documented eight-oared inter-college race occurred in 1815, an equivalent university club was not formed until 1839. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that although Wordsworth, representing Oxford, is credited with initiating the idea, it was Cambridge which issued the initial challenge. Cambridge did also have something of a literal score to settle, having been outclassed in that first cricket match held at Lords on 7 June 1827, though rain meant that it was declared a draw. Oxford’s superiority that day apparently owed much to Wordsworth, who recorded that “my left-hand bowling was so successful on that occasion, that it took no fewer than seven of the Cambridge wickets in one innings”. Read more | Batting for the British Empire: how Victorian cricket was more than just a game So, the CUBC resolved on 12 March 1829: “That Mr Stephen Davis (the Oxford boat-builder) be requested to put the following challenge in some conspicuous part of his barge – ‘That the University of Cambridge hereby challenge the University of Oxford to row a match at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat, during the ensuing Easter vacation’.” With no official university boating authority in Oxford, Stephen Davis (c1799–1837) was evidently considered the next best thing and, considering the contempt with which Oxford’s scholars tended to view most townsmen, and river bargemen in particular, his role would prove to be a remarkably prominent one. It would seem that Davis’s family had been making boats in Oxford since at least the 17th century and, from his location at Folly Bridge, the city’s southern exit over the Thames, he built, sold and hired out a variety of craft and offered his roomy barge for Oxford’s oarsmen to use as their base. Although early records are sketchy, Davis had evidently been incorporated into at least one college crew until the incorporation of professional watermen was prohibited in 1823. He nonetheless wielded huge influence and gained an almost legendary status on the river, accurately described in the novel Peter Priggins, the College Scout as Oxford’s “private nautical, or rather fresh-aquatic, or cymbatic tutor, much to the undergraduate’s advantage and his own”. It was Davis who signed the Oxford response to the Cambridge challenge, jointly with his business partner Isaac King, another boat-builder who had earlier wielded his oars for a college crew. Dated 22 March, the challenge was accepted, but only on condition of a postponement beyond Easter because the “boat racing at Oxford does not commence until June”. In Cambridge, there appears never to have been any comparable use of ringers in the inter-college races, although a townsman did certainly fulfil one important role. Named Bowtell, he was recalled by John Bateman in Aquatic Notes (1852) as: “A singular old character with a wooden leg”, for whom a skiff was purchased by subscription. In this craft “he sculled down every race-day to alongside of the boats” and, when all the captains were ready, he then “fired a pistol, and the boats started”. It was also via a boat-builder, James King, that Cambridge chose to make their response to the Oxford request for a delay, and ultimately Wednesday 10 June was selected as the day of the race, to be held at Henley, rather than London. The captain of the Oxford crew, Thomas Staniforth, had taken the precaution of visiting Henley with Stephen Davis before suggesting this change, it might be noted, and the Oxford crew also had several opportunities to row the course in the week beforehand, with Davis on hand to advise. Nonetheless, as the day approached, Wordsworth wrote to tell Merivale that: “Our boat has been reduced to a considerable pickle, owing to some of our best oars not being able to pull, Stephen Davis’s mismanagement, and one or two minor considerations. We have at last, however, got under way with a fixed crew, and matters are proceeding swimmingly.” When was the first Oxford v Cambridge boat race, and who won? While “swimmingly” is perhaps not the most apt of adverbs under the circumstances, in essence he was right: this first ever university boat race of 1829 resulted in a victory for Oxford. Whether or not Wordsworth was serious about Davis’s “mismanagement”, or merely attempting a bit of gamesmanship, the Morning Chronicle identified Davis as the Oxford “factotum, to whom the entire and sole management of the match appears to have been entrusted”. Davis had built the Oxford boat, trained the crew and ensured that they were catered for. He also shrewdly ensured that their boat was “carefully secreted till the time of starting from the profane gaze of the vulgar”. If a Cambridge waterman played a similar role, he certainly never achieved the same celebrity. The Cambridge boat had been made in London, by Searle & Son, who did not, it seems, emulate the aftercare provided by Davis. This very first contest set an unfailing precedent of attracting huge national interest. The Morning Chronicle reported that “Henley was completely overflowed by the arrival from all quarters of company of the highest respectability”, one estimate putting the number of visitors as high as 20,000 people, more than four times Henley’s resident population. In contrast, “by the middle of the day Oxford was as quiet as in the midst of the long vacation”. After one false start, Oxford emerged victorious by several boats’ lengths. Read more | Wacky races: 10 weird and wonderful contests through history Few of those in the know had any doubt about who was responsible for Oxford’s success. The Sporting Magazine of July 1829 dubbed Stephen Davis “the Professor of Rowing” – a lofty accolade indeed for a man who had probably had very little schooling, yet was rubbing shoulders with crews that contained three future vicars, one prebendary, three deans and two bishops. It is because the Oxford crew comprised four men from Christ Church (plus the cox) that college’s colours were adopted for the day (and have remained the basis of the ‘Oxford dark blue’ ever since). It was not until the next race, in 1836, that Cambridge adorned their boat with a ribbon of the light blue that would become their own traditional hue. This was probably on account of this being the colour of Eton, where many of that crew had first learned to feather their oars and keep good keel. Stephen Davis died in September 1837, aged only 38, his memory and his 1829 boat being preserved at the River & Rowing Museum at Henley. The second rowing match between the two universities had been held the year before, after a gap of seven years, on the stretch of the Thames between Westminster and Putney. Again, it was Cambridge that had issued the challenge, and again Stephen Davis had been the recipient. The difference this time was that Cambridge was victorious, as indeed it was on the next three occasions, in 1839, 1840 and 1841. This sequence of Cambridge victories came to an end in 1842, but it was an unofficial race the following year which really established the event as the preeminent university contest. The venue was Henley again, as part of the annual regatta that had been held for the first time in 1839, largely as a result of the proven popularity of that first Oxford–Cambridge contest of 1829, and some unofficial races between crews and colleges of the two universities in the interim. The circumstance that made the 1843 race so special was that Oxford triumphed despite being a man down. The all-important position of stroke, by whom the rhythm of the whole crew is regulated, was to have been filled by an exceptional oarsman called Fletcher Menzies, who, with his brother (Sir) Robert, was acknowledged to have inspired the great improvement in the Oxford performance of 1842. Expectations of a repeat performance were high but, just before the race, Menzies was taken ill and had to withdraw. As the rules permitted no substitute, the seven men of Oxford, hopeless of anything more than a creditable defeat, took to their oars. The subsequent improbable victory was a cue for hysterical celebrations. The Oriel College undergraduate Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Tom Brown at Oxford), whose brother George was one of the “glorious seven”, wrote that: “The crew had positively to fight their way into their hotel, and barricade themselves there, to escape being carried round Henley on our shoulders.” The result, he added, “made boating really popular, which it had not been till then”, an opinion echoed by the Oxford don William Tuckwell, who said that prior to that “even the Oxford and Cambridge race, except the first race rowed, excited languid interest”. The victorious 1843 boat was displayed conspicuously by the Thames in Oxford until its remnants were salvaged by Alderman Thomas Randall, a well-known Oxford hatter (feasibly the inspiration for Alice’s Wonderland Hatter) who had it incorporated into the Oxford University Boat Club’s barge. It was gestures such as this that earned Randall, who had no direct university connection, the accolade of “the link between the Town and the Gown” at a time when those age-old physical confrontations between Oxford’s students and its residents were still a very regular occurrence. Read more | Olympic oddballs: 5 unusual Olympic sports from the past How many wins does each university have? The boat race became an annual fixture (other than during the two world wars) in 1856, with the overall tally as of the 2021 races standing at 84 victories for Cambridge and 80 for Oxford (with one dead heat in 1877). The first women’s race occurred in 1927, Cambridge having secured 45 wins to Oxford’s 30. Today the university boat race attracts worldwide interest, in a sport in which men and women from Great Britain consistently excel at international levels. It retains its original spirit of amateurism, with no financial reward for being, as the Standard newspaper called that first 1829 race, “the arduous but healthy and delightful amusement of the oar”. Charles Wordsworth would approve, having himself written: “To the players, the game – cricket match or boat race – was as it always ought to be if it is to be truly healthy and uninjurious, sufficiently interesting in itself, and required no further stimulus. In short, it was, like virtue, ‘its own reward’.” Mark Davies is an Oxford local historian, writer, speaker and guide with a particular interest in the influence of the city's waterways on its social and cultural development This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2017 and updated in March 2022
Duncan Stone argues that classism and racism have held back England’s summer sport for decades
Duncan Stone talks to Spencer Mizen about cricket’s history of elitism – a story that, he contends, has long seen the rich and powerful dominate the sport’s evolution and image. Duncan Stone is the author of Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket (Repeater, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones How to download the HistoryExtra podcast Download as MP3
A brief history of the Hillsborough disaster and justice campaigner Anne Williams
On Saturday 15 April 1989, some 96 Liverpool fans attending the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were killed when a crush developed at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. Much to the pain of the victims’ families, the legal process to establish the facts and ascribe guilt for the Hillsborough disaster has endured for more than 30 years
With 96 deaths and 766 injuries, Hillsborough remains the worst sporting disaster in British history. Here, sports historian Simon Inglis explains how the Hillsborough disaster unfolded and why the legal battle to prove that Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed took more than 27 years… Why Hillsborough? Throughout the 20th century, the FA Cup – established in 1871 and arguably the world’s most famous domestic football competition – attracted bumper crowds. Attendance records were common. Wembley Stadium would not have been created, as it was in 1922–23, had it not been for the Cup’s extraordinary appeal. Traditionally, cup semi-finals were played at neutral grounds, one of the most popular being Hillsborough, home of Sheffield Wednesday. Despite a close call when 38 fans were injured during a semi-final in 1981, Hillsborough, with its capacity of 54,000, was considered one of Britain’s finest grounds. As such, in 1988 it hosted another semi, Liverpool v Nottingham Forest, without incident. It therefore seemed the obvious choice when, coincidentally, the two clubs were drawn to meet in the same fixture a year later, on 15 April 1989. What went wrong on the day? Despite having a larger fanbase, Liverpool, to their annoyance were, as in 1988, allocated the smaller Leppings Lane End of Hillsborough, consisting of a seated tier accessed from one block of turnstiles, and a terrace for 10,100 standing spectators, accessed by just seven turnstiles. Even by the standards of the day this was inadequate and resulted in more than 5,000 Liverpool supporters pressing outside as the 3pm kick-off approached. Had the start of the match been delayed, the crush may well have been managed. Instead, the South Yorkshire Police’s Match Commander, David Duckenfield, ordered one of the exit gates to be opened, allowing 2,000 fans to rush through. Those who turned right or left towards the corner pens found room. However, most headed unwittingly, with no warnings from stewards or the police, to the already packed central pen, accessed via a 23m-long tunnel. As the tunnel filled, those at the front of the terrace found themselves pressed up against steel mesh perimeter fences, erected in 1977 as an anti-hooligan measure. Incredibly, with fans patently suffering within full view of the police (who had a control room overlooking the terrace), the match kicked off and continued for nearly six minutes until a halt was called. Ninety four people died on the day. Two died subsequently. Another 766 were injured. Who were the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster? As recorded by a memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield ground, Hillsborough’s youngest victim was 10-year-old Jon-Paul Gilhooley, a cousin of the future Liverpool and England star, Steven Gerrard. The oldest was 67-year-old Gerard Baron, a retired postal worker. His older brother Kevin had played for Liverpool in the 1950 Cup Final. Seven of the dead were female, including teenage sisters, Sarah and Vicki Hicks, whose father was also on the terrace and whose mother witnessed the tragedy unfold from the adjacent North Stand. Who was responsible for the Hillsborough disaster? In his Final Report, in January 1990, Lord Justice Taylor put forward a number of recommendations, the best known of which was for all senior grounds to be converted to seating-only. But just as importantly, he also imposed on the football authorities and clubs a far greater responsibility for crowd management, while at the same time urging the police to be better trained and to balance control of the public with fostering positive relations. As many of newly emerging football fanzines of the time argued, innocent, law-abiding fans were fed up of being treated like hooligans. Professor Phil Scraton, whose damning account, Hillsborough – The Truth was published 10 years after the fateful day, echoed many when he questioned those officers manning the fences. “The screams and desperate pleas… were audible from the perimeter track.” Other commentators noted how brutalised local officers had become as a result of the Miners’ Strike, five years earlier. But the harshest spotlight fell on the police’s Match Commander, David Duckenfield. He had been allocated the task only 19 days beforehand, and this was his first major game in control. How did The Sun newspaper become part of the story? Based on initial briefings by the police, The Sun laid the blame for the Hillsborough disaster squarely on Liverpool fans, accusing them of being drunk, and in some cases of deliberately hindering the emergency response. It alleged that fans had urinated on a policeman, and that money was stolen from victims. Overnight The Sun achieved pariah status on Merseyside. What was Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to the Hillsborough disaster? Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was no admirer of football. On the contrary, in response to increasing hooliganism at games during the 1980s her government was in the process of enacting the controversial Football Spectators’ Act, requiring all fans to join a compulsory identity card scheme. Mrs Thatcher visited Hillsborough the day after the disaster with her press secretary Bernard Ingham and Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, but spoke only to the police and local officials. She continued to back the police’s version of events even after the Taylor Report exposed their lies. Nevertheless, as the flaws inherent within the Football Spectators’ Act now became apparent, its terms were changed to place the emphasis on stadium safety rather than on spectator behaviour. But Mrs Thatcher’s disdain for football was never forgotten and, fearing a public backlash, many clubs refused to allow a minute’s silence to mark her death in 2013. Sir Bernard Ingham, meanwhile, continued to blame Liverpool fans until as recently as 2016. What happened after the Hillsborough disaster? Much to the pain of the victims’ families, the legal process to establish the facts and ascribe guilt has endured over 30 years. In 1991 a jury in the coroner's court found by a majority verdict of 9­–2 in favour of accidental death. All attempts to revisit that verdict were stymied. In 1998 the Hillsborough Family Support Group launched a private prosecution of Duckenfield and his deputy, but this too was unsuccessful. Finally, in the 20th anniversary year the government announced that a Hillsborough Independent Panel would be set up. This took three years to conclude that Duckenfield and his officers had indeed lied in order to deflect blame onto the fans. A fresh inquest was then ordered, taking a further two years before the jury overturned the original coroners’ verdict and adjudged in 2016 that the victims had in fact been unlawfully killed. Duckenfield eventually faced trial at Preston Crown Court in January 2019, only for the jury to fail to reach a verdict. At his retrial later that same year, despite having admitted to lying, and with barely any reference to the Taylor Report findings, to the incredulity of the Hillsborough families Duckenfield was acquitted on charges of gross negligence manslaughter. Who was Anne Williams and what was her connection to the disaster? Refusing to believe the official record of her 15-year-old son Kevin’s death at Hillsborough, Anne Willams, a part-time shop worker from Formby, fought her own relentless campaign. Five times her pleas for a judicial review were turned down until in 2012 the Hillsborough Independent Panel examined the evidence she had gathered – despite her lack of legal training – and overturned the original verdict of accidental death. With evidence from a policewoman who had attended her badly injured son, Williams was able to prove that Kevin had remained alive until 4pm on the day – long after the 3.15pm cut off point set by the first coroner – and that therefore the police and ambulance service had failed in their duty of care. “This is what I fought for,” she told David Conn of The Guardian, one of the few journalists to cover the entire legal saga. “I was never going to give up.” Tragically, she died from cancer just days later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/Hillsborough-campaigner-Anne-Williams-c46a6f6-scaled.jpg" width="1977" height="2560" alt="Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams" title="Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams arrives for the Hillsborough disaster memorial service at Anfield, marking the 24th anniversary of the disaster in 2013. (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Archive/PA Images)" /> Have the lessons of Hillsborough been learned? On the legal front, seemingly not. Campaigners’ attention has now turned to the promotion of a ‘Hillsborough Law’. If passed, the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill would put the onus on public servants to act at all times in the public interest, with transparency, candour and frankness, and for bereaved families to gain funding for legal representation instead of having to raise legal fees themselves. But a second reading of the bill has been delayed – the bill has not progressed through parliament since 2017. Hillsborough campaigners warn that the same issues that obstructed their efforts are now being repeated in the case of Grenfell Tower. Listen | Architect Peter Deakins discusses his involvement in the creation of the Grenfell tower block and considers its place in the history of social housing in Britain Has stadium safety improved since the Hillsborough disaster? Hugely. The Taylor Report recommended that major grounds be all-seated after 1994, and that the role of local authorities should be overseen by a newly formed Football Licensing Authority (since renamed the Sports Grounds Safety Authority). A raft of new measures relating to medical needs, radio communications, stewarding and safety management has now become standard. Not least is the requirement that safety is now the responsibility of stadium operators, not the police. All FA Cup semi-finals are now staged at Wembley. Before 1989 there had been tragedies at Ibrox Park, Glasgow in 1902 (26 dead), Bolton in 1946 (33 dead), Ibrox again in 1971 (66 dead) and Bradford in 1985 (56 dead). In between there were dozens of other isolated fatalities and near misses. Since Hillsborough there have been no major accidents at British football grounds. But as Taylor himself warned, the greatest enemy of safety is complacency. Simon Inglis is the author of several books on sporting history and stadiums. He reported on the aftermath of Hillsborough for The Guardian and Observer, and in 1990 was appointed a member of the Football Licensing Authority. He has edited two editions of The Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds, and since 2004 has been editor of the Played in Britain series for English Heritage (www.playedinbritain.co.uk) This article was published by HistoryExtra in April 2020
Did Nazis guards really play a 'death match' against a Ukrainian football team?
In August 1942, a team of Ukrainian players called FC Start played against a team from the German armed forces. What happened next was soon caught up in Soviet myth, and became known as the 'Death Match'. How much is known about what happened?
The Berlin Olympics in 1936 was intended both as a propaganda display of Nazi might and a demonstration of the physical supremacy of Aryans over all other races. Yet famously the world watched as the notion of Aryans as the ‘master race’ was challenged, even crushed, by the African-American all-star athlete Jesse Owens and his four gold medals. Six years later, with WW2 raging, the Nazis would attempt another sporting stunt to show their superiority, this time over one of their conquered populations that they deemed to be untermenschen, or subhumans. Again, the idea was tested and found wanting, and involved a football match. On 9 August 1942, at the Zenit Stadium in occupied Kiev, a team of Ukrainian players called FC Start – malnourished, forced into labour at a bread-making factory, and living in constant fear – played against a team from the German armed forces, called Flakelf. They were the best the Nazis had to offer, said to have been kept away from the front lines by Herman Göring himself to ensure their safety. There were stories of the game being officiated by Gestapo or SS officers; of explicit threats being made to the Ukrainians of what would happen to them if they didn’t lose; and of armed soldiers patrolling the edge of the pitch. And when FC Start pulled off an unlikely win with a score of 5-3, the players were reportedly executed while still wearing their kits. It became known as the ‘Death Match’. To this day, the murdered players are celebrated as heroes: symbolising bravery, defiance and triumph against oppression. A statue of them stands outside a Kiev stadium. Read more | Did the First World War Christmas truce football match really happen? But this version of the Death Match is a Soviet myth. The truth was lost in the years following the final whistle, utilised and corrupted by the Soviet propaganda machine to hold the match aloft as a glorious example of the victory of communism over fascism. The football was actually played fairly and the players weren’t killed afterwards. In fact, those who survived the war were compelled to repeat the version of events created by Soviet authorities, aware that they were lies. FC Start had been formed from former professional players, mainly from the clubs Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotiv Kiev. Following the Nazi occupation in 1941, they had been forced to find what work they could. Nikolai Trusevich, the Dynamo goalkeeper, got a job at one of the large bakeries, which was owned by the sports-mad Joseph Kordik. Together, they brought in other players and made a team. They played a number of matches during 1942 against other Ukrainian teams – including Ruch, formed by and made up of Nazi sympathisers – and also Germans. They won every single game, usually with crushing score lines. Such was FC Start’s dominance that the Nazis put together the team Flakelf for a match on 6 August, but they lost heavily 5-1. The so-called Death Match was a rematch, scheduled by the Germans for just three days later. They made sure to promote that they had “strengthened” their side and were out, as one of the rare surviving posters read in large lettering, for “revenge”. The details of the match are sketchy and conflicting due to there being no coverage (the embarrassed Germans wanted to ignore the result) and decades of Soviet misinformation. What can be gleaned has come from some of the 2,500 spectators. FC Start did win 5-3 and walked off the pitch alive. Over the next ten days, most of the FC Start players were arrested at the bakery and sent to concentration camps to work. Five were dead within six months. The Soviet version claims that this was a direct response to the match, but this is highly unlikely. A set of investigations, which began in the 1970s and didn’t conclude until the 2000s, determined that no connection could be found between the Death Match and their actual deaths. Read more | What would you have done? 6 terrible choices people had to make during the Second World War The Ukrainians were instead caught up in the widespread and brutal Nazi persecutions, having been suspected of working with the Soviet secret police or accused of other crimes. Then after the war, the survivors were suspected of collaborating with the Germans. They were political pawns, when all they wanted to be was football players. The 'Death Match' has since inspired the plot of several films, including the 1961 Hungarian film Two Half Times In Hell. This Q&A was first published by HistoryExtra in 2021
What was the penny-farthing, and how dangerous was it for those who used them in the 19th century? Find out more with this answer from BBC History Revealed
The penny-farthing bike got its name from its two differently-sized wheels, with the front wheel likened to a penny coin and the much smaller rear wheel compared to a farthing (a quarter of a penny). It was a style of bicycle popular in the 1870s and 1880s. The large wheel allowed each turn of the pedals to drive the bicycle a greater distance, and also allowed for a smoother ride over the cobbled streets and uneven roads of the period. But with the rider sitting up to 1.5m off the ground, broken bones were all too common in the event of accidents. Even worse, the position of the rider over the front axle meant that any sudden stop caused by hitting a stone would hurl the rider forward headfirst. Hitting the ground with the head could be, and sometimes was, fatal. The popularity of penny-farthings waned with the development of gears, allowing the ratio between pedal and wheel to be varied. The second breakthrough was the pneumatic tyre, which gave a smoother ride. By 1893, ‘safety bicycles’ were on sale and penny-farthings were no longer being made. Read more: Choppers, burners and boneshakers: the rise of British cycling This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine
How the 1964 Tokyo Olympics redefined Japan
With the Olympics underway in Tokyo, Chris Harding looks back at 1964 – the last time Japan hosted the competition
With the Summer Olympics underway in Tokyo, Chris Harding looks back to the 1964 games – the last time Japan hosted the competition. He explores how the competition redefined the nation on the world stage two decades after the Second World War. Christopher Harding is the author of The Japanese: A History in 20 Lives (Allen Lane, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
From Hollywood to war heroes: 10 Olympians who were more famous outside sport
From Nobel Prize winners to Hollywood heartthrobs, Gavin Mortimer profiles 10 Olympians who were more famous for what they achieved outside the Olympic arena than in it.
It requires an enormous amount of hard work to become an Olympian and an even greater effort to stand on the podium with a medal around your neck. Yet since the first modern Olympics in 1896, a handful of competitors have managed to distinguish themselves on the silver screen, the battlefield and in the world of politics – as well as going for gold in the Games. John Jacob Astor V, 1st Baron Astor of Hever Gold medallist turned soldier, politician, media baron and peer Born in New York City in 1886, JJ Astor (pictured below) came to England with his family five years later and became a British citizen before adolescence. He trod the same path as many of the country’s elite – Eton, Oxford and the Guards – but Astor achieved athletic distinction in the 1908 London Olympics by winning a bronze in the singles of the Rackets and a gold partnering Vane Pennell in the doubles. In truth, Astor was required to win just one match for his bronze medal, while the only entrants for the doubles competition were British. After the London Games, Astor served as aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India and then saw action in the First World War. After the conflict, Astor – minus his right leg – became a Unionist MP for Dover from 1922 to 1945. He also served as chief proprietor of The Times for many years and in the late 1930s was president of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and a member of the BBC’s general advisory council. He died in 1971 having accepted a peerage 15 years earlier. Gladys Olive Jepson-Turner The figure-skating Hollywood star who “hated the ice” Born into good English stock in 1923, Gladys Olive Jepson-Turner was only 12 when she skated for Britain in the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. She recalled later that all the skaters were instructed to give a Nazi salute before stepping on to the ice. Jepson-Turner finished 16th in the ladies’ figure skating competition. The following year she turned professional and took the stage-name ‘Belita’, winning plaudits for her role in Claude Langdon’s Rhapsody on Ice. It was the start of a glittering career for the beautiful blonde and in the early 1940s she relocated to Hollywood where her contract with Allied Artists netted her $2,000 a week. Described as “one of Hollywood’s top box-office stars”, Belita appeared in films alongside Clark Gable and Gene Kelly before she retired from show business in 1956. “I hated the ice. I hated the cold, the smell, everything about it,’’ she subsequently confessed. In later years she ran a garden centre in west London before retiring to France where she died in 2005. King Olav V of Norway Monarch, sailing ace and official ‘Norwegian of the 20th century’ The ‘People’s King’, as Olav V was known by his subjects, won a sailing gold for Norway in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. A Crown Prince at the time, Olav competed in the 6 Metre Class and skippered a crew of four to glory ahead of Denmark and Estonia. Following the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, Olav volunteered to remain as head of the resistance. This idea was quickly overruled by his father, King Haakon VII, and instead Olav fled to London where he became a figurehead for Norwegians who had been forced to flee from their country. Olav was subsequently appointed chief of defence in the exiled Norwegian government. Olav succeeded his father as king in 1957 and ruled until his death in 1991, aged 87. He was much-loved by the Norwegians and when the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation asked viewers to elect their ‘Norwegian of the 20th century’, King Olav triumphed. Norman Pritchard The Indian sprinting star who took Broadway by storm Born in India in 1877 to British parents, Pritchard was the star of Bengal sprinting in the late 19th century, winning the province’s 100m title in seven consecutive years. He was also a handy footballer (and secretary of the Indian FA) but it was Pritchard’s athletic ability that took him to the Paris Olympics in 1900. Competing for India, he won silver in the 200m in a time of 22.6 seconds, and a medal of the same colour in the now defunct 200m hurdles, becoming in the process the first Asian-born Olympian to medal. Pritchard settled in London in 1905 and the following year was encouraged by Sir Charles Wyndham to take up acting. Proving a natural thespian, he became a star of the West End and on Broadway and in 1915 he made his silver screen debut in After Dark. Under the stage name Norman Trevor he starred in 28 movies before dying of a ‘brain malady’ – thought to be Alzheimer’s in 1929. Jack Yeats The man who won Ireland’s first ever Olympic medal – for a painting The younger brother of Nobel Laureate poet WB Yeats, Jack was an expressionist painter and an influential Irish artist. Though his favourite subjects were the Irish landscape and horses, Yeats found fame in 1924 with The Liffey Swim, a depiction of the annual swimming race in Dublin’s river. The work was entered in the ‘Painting’ category of the art competition at the Paris Olympics (art competitions were part of the Olympics from 1912 to 1948) and it won Ireland a silver medal. Luxembourg painter Jean Jacoby took gold with his paintings Corner, Départ and Rugby. Yeats later published several novels and wrote numerous plays, but he was a painter first and foremost and, in November 2010, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night fetched £350,000 at auction. Peter Scott A lover of sport and the face of natural history The son of explorer Robert Falcon Scott, Peter (pictured below) grew up knowing that shortly before his death in the Antarctic in 1912 his father had written to his mother, saying, “Make the boy interested in natural history. It is better than games.” But Peter went against his father’s wishes in his early years and in the 1936 Berlin Olympics he represented Britain in sailing. Competing in the single-handed dinghy event, Scott took bronze. When war broke out in 1939, Scott was commissioned into the navy and was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross while serving on a destroyer. After the war he went into broadcasting and in 1947 commentated for the BBC on the marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. But it was in the field of natural history that Scott made his mark (and received a knighthood in 1973) in a series of television programmes. In 1961 he was one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund and by the end of his life in 1989 he was a renowned artist and writer. Noel Chavasse Sprinter and double Victoria Cross winner Along with his twin brother, Christopher, Noel (pictured above) ran for Britain in the 400m in the 1908 London Olympics while reading medicine at Oxford University. Both brothers were eliminated in the heats with Noel recording a time well below his personal best. On completion of his medical studies in 1912, Noel Chavasse became house surgeon at the Royal Southern Hospital in Liverpool and a year later joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). It was while he was serving with the RAMC in the First World War that Chavasse achieved the distinction of becoming the only man in the conflict to be awarded two Victoria Crosses, one of which was for bravery shown during the 1916 battle of the Somme. Chavasse earned the second VC in 1917 but died of his wounds before the medal could be bestowed on him. George Patton The straight-shooting general who excelled in the pentathlon Immortalised during the Second World War as ‘Old Blood and Guts’, George Patton was an athletic young buck when he represented the USA in the 1912 Stockholm Games. Selected in the modern pentathlon, Patton gave up tobacco and alcohol as he trained for the Olympics. He did well in four of the five events: pistol shooting, 4,000m footrace, fencing and 5,000m equine steeplechase. But Patton’s swimming cost him a place among the medals and he finished fifth overall. Patton’s military career took off within a couple of years of the Games. He finished the Second World War in command of the Third Army having led them through France and into Germany. He was killed in a car accident in December 1945, aged 60. Philip Noel-Baker MP, war hero and Nobel Prize winner who also found time to win a silver medal The only Olympian to have won a Nobel Prize, Philip Baker ran for Britain in the 1500m at the 1912 and 1920 Games. He finished sixth in the Stockholm Olympics and eight years later he took silver in Antwerp in a time of 4 mins 02 secs. In between Games, Baker served in the Friends (Quakers) Ambulance Unit during the First World War and was decorated for gallantry. He married after the war (appending his wife’s name to become Noel-Baker) and was heavily involved in the establishment of the League of Nations. In 1929 he was elected to the Commons as Labour MP for Coventry and, though he lost his seat two years later, Noel-Baker returned as MP for Derby in 1936 and sat in parliament until 1970. At the end of the Second World War, Noel-Baker played a prominent role in the British delegation that helped draft the charter of the United Nations. A fervent campaigner for nuclear disarmament, Noel-Baker received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. He died in 1982. Johnny Weissmuller King of the jungle, king of the swimming pool, king of the divorce settlement For a man best remembered for his ‘Tarzan yell’, Johnny Weissmuller’s portrayal of the jungle hero detracted from his achievements as an Olympian. The winner of five gold medals in the pool, the 6ft 3in Weissmuller was the greatest swimmer of his age and dominated both the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, winning every race in which he appeared and setting new world records. Upon retirement, the Hungarian-born American became a swimwear model and then in 1932 appeared in the first of 12 Tarzan films. As his heartthrob status grew, Weissmuller was told by MGM to divorce his wife and the studio paid her off with $10,000. By the time of his last Tarzan film in 1948, Weissmuller had earned an estimated $2m from the role and gone through four wives. He married wife number five in 1963, by which time Weissmuller had retired from acting and set up business in Florida. He died in 1984 aged 79. This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
The first modern Olympics: what happened at the 1896 games?
It took the drive and ambition of one Frenchman to reinstate the Olympics on the sporting calendar. Nige Tassell tells the story of Pierre de Coubertin and the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896
The noise would have been deafening, 60,000 cheering voices resonating around a stadium the shape of an elongated horseshoe. It would have been a noise like no living person had heard before. And it was a noise that celebrated the deeds of a lowly water-carrier, a young man unknown to the crowd a couple of hours before. It was late on an afternoon in Athens in 1896 and the occasion was the first edition of the modern Olympics. This young man – Spyros Louis – was making history, about to be elevated to the status of national hero. Here at the Panathenaic Stadium, to the rapturous acclaim of the home nation, Louis was completing an extraordinary sporting triumph. Victory in the marathon, in a shade under three hours, was in the bag. The celebrations extended beyond the stadium into the surrounding hills. As the American reporter Charles Waldstein would soon observe in the pages of The Field, this corner of Athens was “covered with a huma crowd that from a distance looked like bees clustering over a comb… this mass of humanity rising in one greatshout of joy”. On crossing the line, Louis was greeted by George I, the King of Greece, standing to applaud. For a nation claimed to be Europe’s most bankrupt, his victory was a focus for national unity. As Waldstein noted, the occasion reached back into Ancient Greek history. “It might almost have been Philippides of old bringing to the anxious inhabitants of Athens the news of their glorious victory, the salvation of their country and home.” Who 'invented' the modern Olympics? Waldstein wasn’t the only non-Greek enthralled by proceedings. The man whose vision, energy and powers of persuasion had brought about the return of the Olympics – the diminutive FrenchmanBaron Pierre de Coubertin – was caught up in the excitement too. He later described how the Athenian audience “rose to its feet like one man, swayed by extraordinary excitement”, before “a flight of white pigeons was let loose, women waved fans and handkerchiefs, and some of the spectators who were nearest to Louis left their seats, and tried to reach him and carry him in triumph”. This dramatic, irresistible achievement was the culmination of Coubertin’s relentless dreaming. Despite his comparative youth (he was only 33 at the time of these first modern Olympic Games), he’d been campaigning for an international multi-sport event for years. And, as unlikely as it might sound, a major inspiration for such a display of global athleticism could be found in the lush countryside of Shropshire. The Wenlock Olympian Games, held in the market town of Much Wenlock, had been established in 1850 by a local doctor named William Penny Brookes, who was attempting to promote moral, physical and intellectual well-being among the community. The events at those first Games included athletics, football, cricket and quoits. Brookes’ creation was well established by the time Coubertin paid him a visit in 1890. Fired up by a sporting festival held specially in his honour, the Frenchman returned to Paris where he set up the International Olympic Committee and proceeded to lobby for assistance to organise a truly international equivalent of what he’d seen in Much Wenlock – to revive the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece. His aim was a noble one: “to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility”. In 1894, Coubertin’s committee held a congress at the Sorbonne in Paris, where those who shared his vision helped draw up plans for the inaugural modern Olympics. Initially intended to take place in Paris to coincide with the 1900 World Fair, that six-year gap was considered to be too distant a date to maintain the momentum that the Olympic movement was gathering. Instead, a decision was made to hold the event within two years, and that Athens was the obvious and symbolic location from where to launch the updated version. Greece, far from the most economically stable of European countries, received assistance from the legacies of a pair of philanthropists – Evangelis and Konstantinos Zappas. The cousins had been involved in multi-sport events in their own country earlier in the 19th century and their respective estates helped finance major projects, such as the restoration of the Panathenaic Stadium. In the two years between the announcementand the start of the Games, Athens worked its collective socks off to get itself ready for thespectacle, to honour the weight of expectation on its shoulders. The building programme was both swift in its execution and impressive in its results. The pavilions and boathouses for the rowing competition were particularly praised, even if the poor weather of early April meant the cancellation of both the rowing and sailing events. Although painted wood had to replace the marble that had been specified in the original plans, the Panathenaic Stadium was just about ready for competition despite, just two years earlier, the site having – in Coubertin’s words – “resembled a deep gash, made by some fabled giant”. The public was tuned in too, the mood both celebratory and expectant, exemplified by Athens’s public buildings being draped in bunting and streamers. The Games opened on the 75th anniversary of Greek independence. Two hundred and forty-one athletes, from 14 nations, competed across nine sports – athletics, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, swimming, tennis, weightlifting and wrestling. Each and every athlete was male, though, with Coubertin’s energy and drive sadly matched by a misplaced chauvinism. Prior to the Games, he declared that the participation of women would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”. Fortunately, this attitude didn’t prevail. The prohibition would be lifted in time for the second modern Games four years later, held in the Baron’s home city of Paris. How faithful were the 1896 Games to the original Olympics? When Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the newly formed International Olympic Committee reinstated the Olympics in 1896, they very much took the ancient Olympics, held between around 776 BC and AD 394, as their template. What is known these days as athletics – running, jumping, throwing – formed the foundation of the modern Olympics, with certain disciplines, such as the marathon and the discus, a fixture of the Games from both antiquity and the 21st century. Competitors from 14 countries converged on Athens in April 1896 to take part in 43 events (compared to more than 300 at Rio 2016) including weightlifting, wrestling, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, shooting, track and field, and a marathon along the legendary route taken by Pheidippides. The ancient sports formed the template, but in 1896, some events were given a modern re-rub. Boxing, popular during the ancient Olympics, was replaced by the more noble pursuit of fencing, while chariot-racing – not the hottest of pastimes in the closing years of the 19th century – saw its place taken by the more appropriate sport of cycling (both track and road racing). Some changes were more fundamental than these. The ancient Olympics were largely Greek only affairs (although there were exceptions to this, especially in the Roman era when future Emperor Tiberius was victorious in the four-horse chariot race). Coubertin, on the other hand, very much saw the modern Games as providing the opportunity for international competition. Born out of this, the baron was also keen for the Olympics to travel, for the hosting of the Games to be shared around competing nations every four years. Greece, handed the symbolic hosting of the 1896 event, wanted the Games to be permanently based in Athens, but the Frenchman’s internationalist resolve won out. It may not have been coincidence that the second city to welcome the modern Games was Coubertin’s own home of Paris. What were the ancient Olympics like? Take a visit to the Games of 436 BC Britain's "awkward squad" Britain wasn’t exactly in a rush to commune with Coubertin’s feast of sport. In the words of Olympic historian David Randall, British sporting administrators were fully paid-up members of “the European awkward squad”, conspicuously inert when it came to ramping up enthusiasm for the Olympics’ modern rebirth. Not only were there no attempts to create a national team, but also any recruitment drive to sign up individual athletes was invisible. Non-existent, in fact. The Americans had looked to the established athletes of Ivy League universities to fill the berths on the boat to Greece. Britain had a ready-made equivalent – the sport-friendly colleges of Oxford and Cambridge – but these weren’t plundered for talent. “No approaches were made,” explains Randall, “and of the few Oxford men who did compete in Athens, one saw a note on a college noticeboard, one had Greek friends who told him of the Games, and another saw a small advertisement in the shop window of travel agent Thomas Cook.” Fewer than ten Brits made the trip to Athens, and of those that did, commitment could be found, on occasion, to be wanting. Thomas Curtis, an American high-hurdler, later recalled how one beaten British athlete “stopped neither to linger nor to say farewell, but went from the stadium to the station and took the first train out of Athens”. In sharp contrast, every American, whether athlete or spectator, threw themselves into proceedings with gusto. The warship San Francisco was in port, allowing its crew to become enthusiastic supporters of US competitors across the track-and-field disciplines. Members of the Boston Athletic Association were also in good number, lending loud vocal encouragement whenever one of their athletes came out to compete. “B.A.A! Rah! Rah! Rah!” Although these first modern Games weren’t organised along the lines of national teams, the Americans nonetheless took more individual victories than any other nation, although Greek athletes won the most medals. Rather than the gold medals with which the Games would subsequently be associated, winners were presented with silver medals, an olive branch and a diploma. Along with their sporting prowess, the hosts were commended for the way they had received all competitors, irrespective of where they were from. Writing a month after the Games ended, Charles Waldstein was quick to praise, breathlessly reporting of “the generous joy and enthusiasm which moved the Greeks and all the visitors at each victory, to whatever nation it might have fallen”. The greatest reception, understandably, was for the heroics of Louis, the marathon runner. Coubertin’s recollection of what happened in the minutes following the young Greek’s monumental victory is acute and vivid. “A lady who stood next to me unfastened her watch, a gold one with pearls, and sent it to him; an innkeeper presented him with an order good for three hundred and sixty-five free meals; and a wealthy citizen had to be dissuaded from signing a cheque for ten thousand francs to his credit. Louis himself, however, when he was told of this generous offer, refused it. The sense of honour, which is very strong in the Greek peasant, thus saved the nonprofessional spirit from a very great danger.” In that one act of polite refusal, Louis had crystallised the amateur values that placedglory over reward, principles that would define the Olympic movement for many decades to come. Indeed, Waldstein was another who cautioned against the possibly poisonous effects of professionalism on the young champion. “He is as yet quite simple and unspoilt, and we must hope that his success will not turn his head.” Alongside preserving the purity of sporting endeavour, Coubertin saw enough in these first Games to be optimistic about the spirit of internationalism he saw as essential to the event’s future success. “On the world at large the Olympic Games have, of course, exerted no influence as yet, but I am profoundly convinced that they will do so.” And he was aiming beyond sport. “Should the institution prosper – as I am persuaded, all civilised nations aiding, that it will – it may be a potent, if indirect, factor in securing universal peace. The crazy sports of 1900: What happened at the second modern Olympics in Paris? Held in Paris in 1900, the second incarnation of the modern Games pushed the definition of sport into new areas. With the Games part of the World’s Fair, many new events were introduced, plenty of which were, frankly, bizarre. Until 1924, host nations were allowed to determine which sports could be included – and the French got very creative. Tug of war, which made its debut at Paris and was a fixture of the Games until 1920, seems quite tame in comparison to what else was on the bill of fare. There was the swimming obstacle race, where competitors had to plunge into the River Seine, climb up and down a pole before clambering over and under a flotilla of boats. Another ill-fated event was the standing triple jump made its one and only appearance in the athletics stadium in 1900. Animals were also involved in two of the newly introduced events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, live pigeon shooting never appeared again after Paris, where 300 birds were killed, 21 of them shot down by the winner, Léon de Lunden of Belgium. And then there were a pair of new equestrian events – the horse high jump and the horse long jump. Belgium again won the latter event, although the winning leap of just over six metres was actually shorter than the human long jump record. While many of these disciplines would never appear again, there was one lasting, highly significant legacy of the 1900 Games: women were allowed to take part, competing in croquet, equestrian, golf, tennis and sailing. Nige Tassell is a freelance journalist specialising in history. The 2020 Olympics were delayed due to the coronavirus and are current due to take place 23 July to 8 August 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. You can follow the action and the latest news at BBC Sport This article was first published in the August 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed