There was something heroically, almost cussedly amateurish about the London Olympics of 1948.

Run on a shoestring, put together with all the haphazardness of a Heath Robinson cartoon, the first post-war games should, by rights, have been a disaster. The country, still in the grip of rationing, could barely afford a tea party, let alone the exorbitant expense of a two-week sporting jamboree. There was no money for stadiums, no labour for building work, little housing for competitors, and barely enough food for residents, never mind the thousands of visitors expected to attend.

And yet, quite against expectation, the 1948 games worked. Relying on the goodwill of other war-weary countries, deliberately eschewing the overt nationalism of Berlin in 1936 (though continuing the “tradition” of the torch parade invented by the Germans), and embracing the old Olympic ideal of simply “taking part”, London contrived, almost by accident, to create one of the friendliest games of the modern era. (Not inviting the Germans and Japanese helped, as did allowing the Soviets to stay at home and sulk.) As the great Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek explained, “After all those dark days - the bombing, the killing, the starvation - the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out...Suddenly there were no frontiers, no more barriers, just the people meeting together.”

Almost everything about the 1948 games was a botch. The main athletics circuit at Wembley stadium was a hastily converted dog track, the Olympic pool next door a former ice rink. Competitors were driven to and from events in London buses, and were mostly housed in military camps and schools. With the government unwilling to fund anything, every penny spent by the organising committee had to be counted. Timber was begged from Sweden and Finland, gymnastic equipment from Switzerland. Competitors were asked to bring their own towels (spares could be hired by those who forgot), and new supplies of basketballs, footballs and boxing gloves were ordered only after assurances that they could be sold off later at cost. When cycling at the Herne Hill velodrome overran one evening, cars had to be driven in to illuminate the remaining races. Nobody had thought to put in floodlights.

As Janie Hampton makes clear in this delightfully brisk and impressively researched jog through the history of the London tournament, this atmosphere of making do (a thudding cliché now, a basic reality then) also extended to the athletes. Many appeared at the most important sporting event of their lives wearing hastily assembled, homemade kit. The British sprinter Audrey Mitchell, who won silver in the women's 100m, put together a pair of shorts that “were more like big baggy knickers” than sleek running gear. “My mother made mine from some terry towelling,” remembered British rower Tony Butcher. They were better than most other shorts, he added, “as they didn't slip”. Training methods, even those employed by some of the Olympic greats, were just as eccentric. The fabled Zatopek, who would astound the watching world with his uncoordinated run to gold in the 10,000m and his heroic late dash to silver in the 5,000m three days later, trained for Wembley by running in his army boots and occasionally carrying his wife, an Olympic javelin thrower, on his back.

What strikes you as you read Hampton's enthusiastic prose is just how truly old-fashioned the 1948 games were; the shock of dissonance between then and now is there on every page. Only 385 of the 4,000 competitors in London were women: female athletes were still considered unfit to swim more than 400m, ride horses, shoot, row or run long distances, and most were accompanied to the games by chaperones. Sundays were for religion, not running (nobody thought to consult the Muslim athletes about timing; they were labouring under the extra burden of Ramadan), and drugs had none of the sinister overtones of later years. The nearest most competitors came to illegal substances were the fistful of Horlicks tablets they took to help them sleep.

Instead of performance enhancers, the issue that really exercised organisers in 1948 was amateurism. The British were particularly fierce about this: poor Denis Watts, the AAA champion at “hop-step-and-jump” (triple jump, to you and me), was barred from competing because he had applied for a post as a PE teacher. “Had he delayed his job application until after the games,” explains Hampton mournfully, “he would have been able to compete.” Such stringency, ignored by countries such as Hungary, which simply put promising athletes into the army, severely affected home-grown chances of gaining gold. Add to that the debilitating effects of rationing on British athletes - many were getting food parcels before the games from well-wishers overseas - and it's not surprising the country gained only three golds, two of them in rowing and one in sailing. (Britain ended up 12th in the table, with the Americans, fortified by outsize imports of steak, first with 38 golds, and Sweden, neutral in the war, a surprise second with 16.)

Amid all this, some genuine stars did emerge. One was the now-famous Dutch sprinter Fanny Blankers-Koen, “the flying housewife”, a 30-year-old mother of two who beat all-comers to win four golds. Even more impressive in his way was the British weightlifter Jim Halliday, who had survived Dunkirk, been captured by the Japanese in 1942, had come out of the camps weighing just four-and-a-half stone, and lifted his way to bronze in the lightweight class. Pride of place, though, must surely go to the French athlete Micheline Ostermeyer (a great-niece of Victor Hugo), who had come second in the shot put in the European athletics championship in 1946, the same year she won the Prix Premier as a concert pianist at the Paris Conservatoire. Ostermeyer picked up a discus for the first time only a few weeks before coming to London, but, wearing dark glasses against the glare, threw more than 41m to win the first gold of the games. A few days later she added the shot put gold to her tally of titles, “after which she gave a Beethoven concert in the women's housing centre”.

The Austerity Olympics by Janie Hampton
Aurum £18.99 pp366 Buy the book

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