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Heroism and heartbreak... the golden Olympic memories untainted by time
With today marking the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Bill Bridge speaks to previous medal winners about the Games past and present.
ONE of the beauties and great strengths of the Olympic movement is that the four-yearly gathering of the best athletes in the world, most of them young, some of them approaching middle-age, means different things to different people.
For those of us for whom sport has remained a part of life after accepting at an early age that we lacked the talent to be among
the active participants, the events in Beijing over the coming
days will be an opportunity to luxuriate in admiration, embroidered, perhaps, with a stitch or two of fantasy.
Some of a less charitable bent will scoff at the very mention of the word Olympic. For them the stories of Hitler's Games in 1936, the boycotts of Los Angeles and Moscow, the drug scandal of Ben Johnson and the financial morass which enveloped Montreal, Atlanta and Athens as a result of hosting the Olympics combine to make the concept of Pierre de Coubertin, that an ordered gathering of the athletes of the world could only be of benefit to mankind, as relevant to today as the soap bubbles blown by a child.
The cynics argue the chief beneficiaries of Beijing will be companies like Nike and Adidas, who will make fortunes from the global sales of their clothing and footwear, and the Chinese government, who are using the Games as a propaganda tool to become accepted as a leader in the planet's political and economic hierarchy. Sport has had and, indeed, still has many disparate bedfellows.
But for some of us the sport still matters and for those who actually had the God-given talent to be among the world's best in their chosen discipline the Olympic Games represent a pinnacle in their lives, bringing despair and joy in equal measure; their stories still utterly absorbing as they take us back to different times.
The athletics world was so much different in 1956 when Huddersfield-born Derek Ibbotson, a young middle-distance runner with Longwood Harriers, was among the Great Britain team selected for the Melbourne Olympics.
He had earned his place by beating Chris Chattaway for the first time during the summer and Gordon Pirie joined them for the 5,000m. Ibbotson's recall of the race remains pin-sharp.
"Vladimir Kuts, the great Czech runner, was in the field and he was hard to run against because he varied his pace; he would run fast, slow down completely, and then go again. He was in the lead and Chattaway was ahead of Pirie and me when Kuts made the decisive break. Chattaway could not go with him and Kuts opened a gap of 15m and ran away from us."
Ibbotson's reward was bronze, one of only three medals Britain have won over the distance – Ian Stewart (1972) and Brendan Foster (1976) being the others. But it was the travelling arrangements for Melbourne and the gold medal which might have been his which still frustrate him.
He was serving his National Service at RAF Yatesbury in Wiltshire and had been offered an early passage to Australia. "The RAF said they would fly me down so I could start my acclimatisation in plenty of time," he remembers.
He duly asked permission of the Amateur Athletic Association's chairman of selectors Jack Crump but was turned down. His humour was not improved when he discovered that Pirie – then a rarity in Britain as a full-time athlete – Chataway and Chris Brasher,
who would win the 3,000m steeplechase in Melbourne, had all gone to Australia ahead of the main group.
"I went with the rest of the team via places like Athens, Karachi, Calcutta, Djakarta, Darwin and Sydney. It took us two days to get to Melbourne," says Ibbotson, now 76 and living at Ossett.
But that was not the least amateurish aspect of British athletics in 1956. Ibbotson had reluctantly agreed to run in the Emsley Carr Mile on August Bank Holiday Monday and duly won the race in a record for the event of 3min 59.4sec. "I finished 10 to 15 yards ahead of the Irishman Ron Delaney with Ian Boyd from Oxford University another 10 yards away third," he says, the memory still burning.
Ibbotson was congratulated by Crump, who added: "You won't be running the 1,500m in Melbourne; we are picking Ian Boyd in the third spot for the 1,500 because we want him to be team captain." British athletics then was organised largely by and for Oxbridge people.
Delaney duly took the 1,500m gold medal in Australia and when he faced Ibbotson again the following summer the Yorkshireman again proved the better man, this time breaking John Landy's world mile record. "Jack Crump approached me with his hand held out but I brushed it aside," says Ibbotson. "I wasn't going to shake hands with him."
Happier memories remain with Ibbotson of his time in Melbourne. "There was a wonderful, relaxed atmosphere," he recalls. "We all ate in the same huge dining room and I recall sitting next to Judy Grinham, then one of our top swimmers, and some Scottish boxers. We went off to Melbourne races; you could do as you wished once you had completed your training for the day. The training facilities were first-class; everything was fine, I just wish I could have arrived a little bit earlier and run the 1,500m."
The Irish connection will continue for Ibbotson during the Beijing Olympics. "I will be playing golf in the south-east of Ireland with some friends. We will be watching TV before going out and we will also be recording some of the athletics," he says.
Another Yorkshire Olympian, Adrian Moorhouse, will be at the heart of the action in Beijing, providing expert analysis for the BBC during the swimming. "I don't pretend I'm a journalist, I'm just one of those former athletes who are used as experts by the BBC – and I get a great seat," he said from the Chinese capital this week.
"These are my seventh Olympics, my fourth with the BBC. I feel fortunate to have had the best of both worlds. Here I am a fan who speaks into a microphone and it is perhaps some kind of reward for all the hard work I put in when I was competing."
Bradford-born Moorhouse was introduced – like all of us – to the Olympics by newspapers and television. "My first memory of the Games was Munich in 1972; I watched on TV and was captivated by it all, not just the swimming; it was the fact that all the world's sports were coming together.
"I really felt connected in 1976 when David Wilkie won his gold medal in Montreal. I was swimming competitively then and could not believe how big a deal the Olympics were; it was the only time swimming made the back page of the morning papers. The World and European Champions did not make anything like the same impact and I thought to myself, 'This is the highest you can get, if you want to be a swimmer then this is the ultimate'."
Moorhouse was Britain's top breaststroke swimmer at the age of 17 when, in 1981, he won the bronze medal in the European Championships. The following year, he took gold at the Commonwealth Games in Australia and he was among the favourites for the gold in the Los Angeles Games of 1984 so he was devastated at finishing only fourth.
His first thoughts were of retirement, but after taking advice he decided to continue swimming. "I still didn't know what I was capable of doing so decided to work at it for four months and set myself new goals. It was the last roll of the dice before I quit." The following year he broke the world record and the Olympic ambition of his childhood was reborn. Moorhouse went to Seoul in September 1988 as No 1 in the world and beat his great Canadian rival Victor Davis to take the gold medal over 100m.
"By then I had learned to deal with the pressure, to treat the Olympics as just another race, like the Yorkshire Championships. You see too many swimmers put themselves under pressure at
the Olympics; the reality is that
it is no different, you shouldn't build it up until it is out of all proportion. You have to work as hard on the psychology as on the physical training."
The really hard bit comes after the swimming. "Nothing can prepare you for the pain of failure or the elation of winning; at the Olympics it is magnified 100 times compared with anything you have experienced before," says Moorhouse, whose victory in South Korea topped off a medal collection totalling 20, nine of them gold. "You learn that winning is important but losing is not the end of the world."
Moorhouse has no regrets from his competitive years and positively delights in his BBC role but concedes that during his time as a world-class swimmer he did not make the most of visiting parts of the world beyond the dreams of the average youngster. "When you begin to represent your country you are still really a child; you live in the bubble, you are well protected and are not at all worldly," he says. "By the time it came to Barcelona and my third Olympics in 1992, I tried to see a bit of the city and I went to watch some of the other sports but I still didn't absorb the country."
That has all changed. Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and now Beijing with the BBC have given Moorhouse, 44, who rarely swims these days but has made a successful career running his own management company, the chance to enjoy aspects of the Olympic Games that he missed as a young man. Baron de Coubertin would be impressed.
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