More than just games
ALTERNATIVE VIEW - Brian Gillespie
WITH so much other sport going on at the moment, it's difficult to concentrate on the upcoming Olympic Games. They are just weeks away now, however, and interest is starting to ramp up.
On Sunday week, the GAA made a presentation at Croke Park to celebrate its athletics past and to commemorate a century of Ireland’s Olympic Games involvement.
It included a Mayo link too, as the 1924 Ireland team featured Gaelic football star and sprinter Seán Lavan, the man who invented the solo run.
The announcement of the commemoration last week arrived on the day that the GAA remembered the achievement of Tom Kiely from Ballyneale, Tipperary – regarded as the greatest athlete of his generation who was crowned all-round champion in the 1904 Games in St. Louis.
Three years ago (yes, the Tokyo Games were held in 2021 rather than 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic), we revealed in this space that on the per capita gold medal list (from 1896 to 2016), Ireland claimed a respectable 30th place, ahead of big countries such as Brazil, Russia, Spain, Japan, Canada and South Korea, and not all that far behind the USA.
Finland and Hungary were first and second respectively in that per capita list, with Sweden and Norway in fourth and fifth respectively behind Bahamas in third.
The nation with the most golds overall, however, is the USA - a country with a storied history in the Olympic Games. Leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, a new book co-authored by Richard Kaufman and Glenn Allen entitled PLAYED: The Games of the 1936 Berlin Olympics 'harkens to a different era with some startlingly similar realities with worldwide impacts' (in the words of the publishers, WordServe Publishing).
Richard and Glenn spent 25 years meticulously researching the 1936 Olympics, so they know what they're talking about.
It was a time eerily similar to now, with the a world that felt like it was 'teetering on the brink of war', and the authors say the most important message of their story is that history must not repeat itself.
The '36 Games in Berlin are remembered mostly for Jesse Owens' four gold medals, which 'stuck a needle in Adolf Hitler’s attempt to use the games to prove his theory of Aryan racial superiority', and PLAYED examines Owens' success alongside insight into figures such as American Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Goebbels and Eva Braun, to name just a few.
The 2024 Games in Paris are set against a backdrop of the rise of far-right forces in the US and parts of Europe and a world seemingly in political, economic and environmental turmoil. Will these Olympics be viewed in time, like Berlin '36, as more than just games?