Much ado about something - forget London, these are the real Games
This weekend, in a sleepy corner of Shropshire, the 121st Wenlock Olympian Games are taking place. Among the young and old there to celebrate the birthplace of the modern Olympics is Simon Turnbull (18th in the seven-mile road race in 1997)
Published: 15 July 2007
Swimming pool closed tonight, reads the sign outside Much Wenlock Leisure Centre. Up the stairs, on the noticeboard next to the PE office, a message scrawled in felt-tip pen announces: “Mrs Jardine has given birth to a girl. Mother and baby are well.” Along the corridor in the sports hall, Ann Smith is doing very well, thank you, considering that the opening event of the weekend’s Wenlock Olympian Games programme has become unexpectedly stuck in a pregnant pause.
It is 4.02pm on Friday, two minutes past the scheduled start of the inter-schools volleyball competition. One of the schools has been held up on the road from Shrewsbury.
“I’ve just had a text message through from them saying that we haven’t got a fourth girls’ team,” Mrs Smith says as she scribbles on a sheet of A4 paper at courtside. “We’ve now got a fourth boys’ team, so I’m rewriting the draw.”
London still has to wait five years and 14 days before it becomes the first city to stage the modern Olympic Games for a third time, but just 15 minutes later the Shrewsbury slow coach arrives and the unflappable Mrs Smith - the sports co-ordinator at William Brookes School, housed within the same grounds as Much Wenlock Leisure Centre - welcomes the world to the 121st Wenlock Olympian Games. “You should all feel special,” she tells the assembled children, “because you’re part of the event that started the modern Olympics.”
Juan Antonio Samaranch made much the same point when he made the pilgrimage to this idyllic corner of the Shropshire countryside as president of the International Olympic Committee in 1994. “I have come because this is where the modern Olympics started,” he said. Samaranch also came to Much Wenlock to lay a wreath at the grave of Dr William Penny Brookes at Holy Trinity Church. “Dr Brookes was really the founder of the modern Olympics,” Samaranch added.
And so he was, this doctor-cum-philanthropist from Much Wenlock. It was in 1850 that Brookes staged a revived version of the ancient Olympics in Wenlock - 46 years before Pierre de Coubertin did so in Athens.
The French baron did so on a far grander scale, of course, but it was Brookes who first campaigned for an international Olympics. As Helen Cromarty, an indefatigable committee member of the Much Wenlock Olympian Society, says: “It was by putting physical education into French schools that De Coubertin wanted to make his mark. That’s why he came to England, to visit Rugby School. It was Brookes who inspired him to push for an international Olympic Games.”
De Coubertin visited Much Wenlock in 1890, meeting Brookes and attending the Olympian Games in the town. A dinner was held in his honour at The Raven Hotel, where John Cleese was to film scenes for Clockwise some 100 years later. On his return to France, the baron wrote in La Revue Athlétique: “If the Olympic Games, which modern Greece did not know how to establish again, is revived today it is not to a Greek that one is indebted but to Dr W P Brookes.”
Sadly, the good doctor was not to survive long enough to see his international Olympic dream become reality. He died in December 1895, four months before the first modern Olympics were held in Athens. Still, the legacy of William Penny Brookes lives on - even if not a lot of people happen to know about it.
There are eight spectators on the balcony as the rich assortment of school volleyballers, ranging from the girl dressed in a Muppets T-shirt to the stand-out Robbie Smith, a 15-year-old Brookes School pupil and England Schools basketballer, battle for glory in the opening event of a weekend-long festival which comprises 13 other sports.
There are a handful of enthusiasts down at courtside, among them the affable Mrs Cromarty and the genial Dr Don Anthony, a 78-year-old who has made the four-hour drive from Sidcup to lend his support to the hidden national sporting treasure upon which he first stumbled 27 years ago. “I read an article in Athletics Weekly and it said the Moscow Olympics might be in doubt because of the proposed boycott but the Wenlock Olympian Games will definitely go ahead,” Anthony recalls. "I knew nothing about it at all. When you get into it all it’s completely riveting, because it was the beginning of everything.
“De Coubertin himself was an honorary member of the Wenlock Olympian Society in 1891. That’s three years before he founded the International Olympic Committee. It’s fascinating reading correspondence between him and Brookes, who wanted an international Games but based only in Athens. De Coubertin said, ‘No, move it from city to city’. That was the secret to the success of the Games, and Brookes recognised it. He said, ‘That’s a much better idea than mine’.”
Anthony was glad of the idea when he became a global Olympian in 1956, as a hammer thrower in the British team who made the marathon trip to Melbourne. “It took us three days to get there,” he says. The septuagenarian has done more in his sporting life than make that long-haul Olympic appearance. A former Watford reserve-team centre-forward (he played one first-team game, in Division Three South), Anthony is a trustee of the British Olympic Foundation (the charitable arm of the British Olympic Association), and is honorary life president of the English Volleyball Association. It was he, in fact, who founded a national volleyball association on these shores in 1955, having been introduced to the game while training with foreign hammer throwers during his national service days in Cyprus.
“I come to support the teachers,” he says. “When I started the association, volleyball was played mostly by foreigners living in England, but I managed to get it into a teacher training course and from that moment it started to grow. It’s now played in one in every five schools, and by 2012 we want that ratio to be much higher. Everything depends on getting it into the physical education programme. That’s what I’m doing here, supporting people like Ann Smith.”
Not that Mrs Smith is the only teacher banging the Olympian drum in Much Wenlock. Also watching at courtside is Andy Reece, the head of PE at William Brookes School, one of 15 De Coubertin schools around the globe which gather every two years under the umbrella of the International Pierre De Coubertin Committee. “It’s a unique connection we’ve got,” he says, “which all stems back to Dr Brookes and De Coubertin’s visit in 1890.”
There is another special connection between Dr Brookes’ Olympian Games and the Olympics launched by Baron de Coubertin. Reece was educated down the road at Church Stretton School, three years below Alison Williamson, who won an Olympic archery bronze medal in 2004 in the Panathinaiko Stadium that staged the first Games of the modern Olympics in 1896. She had already won a Wenlock Olympian medal on the Linden Fields at William Brookes School, a timeless setting bordered by a windmill, an avenue of elms and the “blue remembered hills” described by A E Housman in the poem A Shropshire Lad. As a 10-year-old she was a silver medallist in the archery competition at Much Wenlock in 1981. Her father, Tom, took the gold.
A member of the Long Mynd Archers in Church Stretton, Williamson is in Leipzig this weekend competing in the Archery World Championships, aiming for a fifth Olympic appearance. Like Brookes, the Shropshire lass does not enjoy the high profile she deserves, although she is on first-name terms with Geena Davis. The Oscar-winning actress was a semi-finalist in the US archery trials for the 2000 Olympics and competed in the Sydney Golden Arrow Competition that year. She was beaten in the first round by Williamson, 160 points to 120.
Mainstream Olympians from outside of Shropshire have come to know and treasure the Wenlock Olympian tradition. Jonathan Edwards visited the town with the London 2012 roadshow last year and was so impressed he has sponsored the track-and- field competition at this year’s Games. Then there was the dainty, frail sexagenarian who delighted the locals on a recent visit with the Czech Olympic Association when she stood up and asked if anyone would like to see an Olympic gold medal she had brought with her.
Vera Caslavska could have brought seven of them. As a fervent anti-Soviet campaigner, the great gymnast was forced to hide in the hills when the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia in April 1968. The Czech government allowed her to go to the Mexico Games that year at the last minute, but she was blackballed when she returned home after turning her head away when the Soviet anthem was played at a medal ceremony. She was made president of the Czech National Olympic Committee when the Communist regime crumbled in 1989.
Such is the rich heritage that the Wenlock Olympian Games are bound up in - the kind of tradition the riches of modern sport simply cannot buy. It has been announced this week that the budget for the 2012 Olympics has trebled to some £9.3 billion. “Our total?” Helen Cromarty ponders, checking her files. “That would be £7,426.” And no £400,000 wastage on a laughing stock of a logo. “No,” Mrs Cromarty says. “Ours was just put together by the committee. It cost the price of a cup of tea.”
A fair contest? London versus Much Wenlock
OLYMPIC/OLYMPIAN GAMES:
London: two (third will be in 2012)
Much Wenlock: 121 (126th in 2012)
SPORTS:
London: 26
Much Wenlock: 14
BUDGET:
London: £9.3bn
Much Wenlock: £7,426
LOGO:
London: £400,000
Much Wenlock: the price of a cup of tea
VENUES:
London: archery at Lord’s and tennis at Wimbledon
Much Wenlock: archery at William Brookes School field and tennis at Wenlock Leisure Centre