Saturday 16 August 2014

Aug 16 1936 - Berlin Olympic Games Closes

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

It may have began in a controversial manner with calls for America to be banned as it's racial discrimination was a violation of Olympic rules and the Germans banning jews and blacks which was later repealed, but once it got underway the 11th Olympics in Berlin turned out to be quite a eye-opener but especially for the Nazis.
It began with a nice touch from the organisers, coming up with the idea of the torch being run from ancient Olympia to the host city which will hopefully be kept for future Olympics.
The Spanish and Soviets boycotted the event but they were not missed as the largest number of teams from around the world participated in these Games, 49 nations in all.
Germany topped the medal table with United States second and Great Britain finishing up in 10th place with four golds.
Especially pleasing was Jesse Owens 4 golds which must have gone down like a lead balloon with the watching Hitler who never wanted any blacks there at all, considering them inferior.
Doubtful that anything will change the mind of someone like Adolf Hitler but hopefully this may have opened  just slightly the minds that consider anyone inferior to anyone else because of the colour of their skin or their religion and that goes for all sides.

2 comments:

Chris said...

Jesse Owens will be ignored and segregation will continue. Nice to see that even at the NAZI party games, the Americans were almost banned due to their own racism.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.