Book Review: IGNITING THE FLAME: AMERICA'S FIRST OLYMPIC TEAM by Jim Reisler (Lyons Press, 2012) ... Plus, "Opening It" Old-School!

Yes, I've got the Olympics on my mind, and I've just finished another worthwhile read delving into the modern Games' frequently strange and curious past.  This time around, the focus is on the 14 young men who formed the American team for the 1896 Athens Olympics.  Though these fellows rated a TV mini-series not so long ago, author Reisler goes that fictionalized effort one better by coupling the story of the recruitment, travels, and triumphs of the U.S. contingent to a quick survey of the development of the modern Olympic movement and the role that American academics, in particular, played in organizing the team and encouraging its participation.  In the late 19th century, thanks to the opening of such schools as Johns Hopkins, MIT, and the University of Chicago, American higher education was trending towards the sciences and other "modern" fields, but classical scholars were still a substantial presence on the typical campus. Some, such as Princeton's William Milligan Sloane, the first president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, jumped at the chance to assist the Greeks in their revival of the ancient Games.  To be sure, some of Sloane's peers were less than enthusiastic about allowing their athletes to go off on what was seen as a purposeless junket; James Connolly, the modern Games' first champion, actually had to drop out of Harvard, never to return, after his request for time off was denied.

The somewhat ramshackle, ad hoc nature of the first modern Olympics is exemplified by American Robert Garrett shockingly winning the discus competition over two Greeks... after having started practicing with the regulation Olympic discus just the day before.  Garrett's victory, however, was one of the key events that cemented a bond of friendship between the enthusiastic American athletes and the Athenians who attended and supported the Games.  The Greeks were especially pleased that the Americans' participation kept the 1896 Games from being an all-European affair.  Despite being skunked in most of the track-and-field events, the Greeks famously got one back on the Americans when Spiridon Louis won the inaugural marathon.  Political disagreements and spats born of envy were conspicuous by their absence, however, and the goodwill fostered by the 1896 Games helped sustain the Olympics during the lean decade that followed, until the events of London 1908 put the Games on solid footing for good (albeit also putting bitter national rivalries in style).  The modern Olympics may never have been truly pristine or innocent, but Athens 1896 was as close as they ever got to being so, and the Americans played no small role in making it happen.
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Tired of Olympic opening ceremonies featuring baffling artistic symbolism, out-of-place tributes to government programs, and irritating lighting effects?  (Though Rowan Atkinson's spoof of Chariots of Fire was admittedly very funny, giving the grandiosely self-important ceremonies a bit of humor that they desperately needed.)  Well, courtesy of YouTube, have I got a treat for you.  Here is the German TV footage of the opening ceremony from the Games of the XXth Olympiad in Munich, 1972.  It's got it all:  Marching (as opposed to sauntering) athletes in garishly colored garb!  Kitschy, yet intriguingly catchy, "country-themed" music!  Afros and dashikis!  Lady (I mean female) athletes carrying handbags!  Bavarian bullwhips and alpenhorns!  Countries that no longer exist!  And much more.  Granted, disaster (please don't call it "tragedy") awaited -- disaster which really should have been memorialized in some fashion at this year's opening ceremonies -- but the start of the Munich Games is a refreshing look back at the way things used to be.  These are the first Olympic Games that I can distinctly remember, and I have a very good book on Munich on my Kindle that I'll be reviewing at some point in the future.