Light of Pietri shines at London Olympics

WEARING baggy shorts and a cloth around his head, Dorando Pietri fell at the finishing tape.

This was during the 1908 marathon in London. The drama was captured on film, telling the public everywhere about this new sporting event: the Olympics.

“It created one of those iconic moments of drama,” said Rebecca Jenkins, author of The First London Olympics: 1908.

“It was the vision of the everyman,” she said. London first hosted the Olympics in 1908. It hosts the games again this year. The 1908 games were supposed to be in Rome, but the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius forced Italy to pull out. By chance, Britain was planning a major exhibition. British aristocrats, after a holiday in Greece, offered to host the games and persuaded the government to agree as long as there was no cost to taxpayers.

Britain’s stamp on the event made the London Olympics memorable. Christie’s auction house recently sold a 1908 poster for £15 000 showing the staying power of images from the early games. “It is the first one with a national emphasis,” said Martin Polley, an Olympic historian at the University of Southampton.

“National identity and culture were coming in. Sport fit perfectly. It was part of the zeitgeist.”

But nothing seared the Olympics into the public imagination like the marathon. The event, which merges the modern games with its ancient Greek ideals, is based on the legend of Pheidippides, the ancient Greek hero said to have run from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens to deliver the news that the Persians had been defeated.

Earlier revivals of the race set the distance at about 40km, but London in 1908 set it at the nowstandard 42,195km, and provided the drama that made it a showpiece event.

There were runners from all over, and each had their own training plan. The Americans soaked their socks in beef tallow, and Canadians bathed their feet in whisky. Pietri came into White City stadium well in the lead. Dazed by the roar of the huge crowd, he started to run in the wrong direction. Then he fell. He got up — and still no rival was in sight. Then American Jimmy Hayes entered the stadium. The Italian was metres from the tape, and two officials helped him to his feet. “Pietri caught his balance and staggered forward. He broke the tape and fell to the ground,” Jenkins wrote. “The stadium erupted.” Hayes finished 32 seconds behind Pietri and protested that the Italian had been helped.

In their report on the games, Olympic officials acknowledged that while they interfered, they did so with the best of intentions.

“He collapsed upon the track,” the report said. “As it was impossible to leave him there, for it looked as if he might die in the very presence of the Queen and that enormous crowd, the doctors and his attendants rushed to his assistance.… There was a generous idea in the heart of nearly every spectator that one who had suffered so much should not be disappointed of the finish he had so nearly reached.”

The crowd — and public opinion — had been mesmerised by Pietri’s heroic effort to finish.

Although he did not win a medal, Queen Alexandra gave Pietri a special cup, a consolation prize to the man who had won the admiration of so many.

Afterwards, the marathon distance was standardised, in part because Pietri and Hayes made money by running rematches.

“One should never underestimate the power of Pietri,” Jenkins said. “(Without him) I don’t know that anyone would see the Olympics in this light.” Sapa-AP