Olympic Cavalcade

104 OLYMPIC CAVALCADE for which he was trained was because he did not take Sam's advice to refuse an invitation to go on a tour of clubs and provincial universities to show' how jumping, throwing and hurdling should be executed. There you have a perfect example of an individual throwing away his and his nation's chances of attaining Olympic honours through sheer pig-headed obstinacy. As was the case with Lawson Robertson, U.S.A., Hjertberg, Sweden, and Boyd Comstock, the American who coached Italy for the 1936 Games, each country should appoint its own professional coach. He should be given entire charge of the teaGhing and training of his team and should advise fully on the selection of its members. There is neither time nor scope in my philosophy for the unpaid amateurs who still act as team managers interfering in the management or the training or the final selection of a nation's Olympic team. Sam Mussa– bini was shut clean out of the picture both in 1920 and aga~n in 1924, and on both occasions men he individually had trained and taught won their events; others who lost by sheer bad luck, while he was watching from the spectator stands, lacked his official advice, upon which they had come to rely so completely. These amateur team managers do their best, I admit, but as the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote: "No man who has his own work to do can spare the time which is needed for such a task." In England, moreover, the Amateur Field Events Association had been formed with permission to promote English championships in Throwing the 56 lb. Weight, the Javelin and the Discus; also the 440 yards Hurdles and the Hop, Step and Jump, for none of which events had English championships been previously institut~d.. · The VIth Olympiad was never celebrated because of the war, and an agreement was reached that the VIIth Olympiad should be celebrated in 1920 at Antwerp; but Belgium had only a year in which to build a Stadium and prepare for an influx of athletes and officials from all over the world. Peace had been signed but the shadow of the First World War still hung over the Games. Many of the great athletes of the past had paid the supreme price during the war, and Belgium itself had been occupied by enemy forces for four years. She, therefore, was not quite up to the task of laying on the Games on a grand scale. Germany and Austria, enemy nations of the Allies, were not invited to participate in the Games, for there were war veterans competing in many events on the Olympic programme. In Great Britian it was the opinion of many people that the Olympic cycle had been interrupted by German aggression and should by no means be revived; others held that the time for a revival should not be so near to the end of the Great War. But the late Rev. R. S. de Courcy Laffan, who had done so much .for the IVth Olympiad in London, was adamant. 1920 would mark the conclusion of the VIIth Olympiad and should witness, therefore, the Vllth Celebration-of tHe Games. The fact that British athletes might not yet be ready for the strong opposition they would be fo·rced to