Olympic Cavalcade

CHAPTER XII PARIS, 1924 IN 1924 the Olympic Games came for the second time to the French capital, but what a difference there was in the set-up and lay-out of the whole Celebration! By 1924 the Olympic programme as a whole was beginning to reach a state of stability. Since 1900, when the Games were held in connec– tionwith the Paris Exposition, there had been the First World War, which had taught the French nation a great deal about British and American ideas of sport. Jean Bouin, the great French distance runner, and Sergeant Hutson, of the British Army, both of whom succumbed to Hannes Kolehmainen at Stockholm, had fallen in .the Great War, as had H. S. 0. Ashington, 'Twiggy' Anderson and Kenneth Powell, the British hurdlers. The Pershing Stadium had been laid out by the American Army and the Bouin Stadium opened in memory of the great French runner by his compatriots. · A French Ministry of Sport had been instituted and already the gassed war veteran Guillemot had proved at Antwerp in 1920 that the spirit of sport introduced by Baron Pierre de Coubertin when he set about reviving for modern use the ancient Olympic Games in 1885 was still very much alive in the hearts ofFrench sportsmen. Moreover, the British universities had proved by the revival of the Oxford and Cambridge Sports on 27 March, 1920, that Great Britain could still produce many of the world's best runners, for we had seen such out– standing athletes in action at Antwerp as Guy Butler, J. C. Ainsworth– Davis and Edgar Mountain, all of Cambridge, and of Oxford the South .– African B. G. D. Rudd and H. B. Jeppe, while men like M. C. Nokes, M.C., R.A, were yet to attain their Olympic laurels. The British representatives, moreover, thanks largely to Brigadier– General R. J. Kentish, C.M.G., D.S.O., were better clad, better equipped and moving much more smartly than had been the case among their com– patriots of pre-war British Olympic teams. The head coach to the U.S.A. contingent was Lawson Robertson. After the final trials at the Harvard Stadium on 14 June, 1924, he declared unequivocally that he had · got hold of the greatest group of first-class athletes ever got together to compete in any set of track and field events. In that year U.S.A. meant to go all out to regain athletic prestige, for the great Republic of the West had, I think, seen and heeded a red light warning when Finland, the little nation of Northern Scandinavia, in 1920 scored as many medals as did the hitherto pre-eminent U.S.A. contingent. There was also a feeling in the States that on their inter-varsity showing the British Blues·could no longer be considered an altogether negligible quantity, and 1,28