The 1948 Olympics : how London rescued the games by Phillips, Bob instant download

The 1948 Olympics : how London rescued the games by Phillips, Bob instant download

xvi, 336 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : 24 cm, The 1948 Olympic Games were the first of the postwar era. Britain was still suffering the after effects of the war. Rationing was in operation. Bomb sites remained throughout London and other major cities. Yet London took on the Games and staged them very successfully. There was no election of London as the chosen venue. The idea had first been raised in 1937 by Lord Burghley that London should hold the Games in 1944. The International Olympic Committee decided without any vote that London should have the 1948 Games. The Games cost three quarters of a million pounds, about £77 million in today's terms. Compare that to the 2012 budget of £3.3 billion! Of course no new facilities were built. This was the make-do-and-mend Olympics. Athletes were housed in barracks and schools and were given tickets for the underground to make their own way to the stadium. Those British athletes who lived in or near London stayed at home. The book tells how London came to be awarded the Games, how they were managed, and their economic, political and social significance. Each of the sports are described, but this is no endless list of dry statistics. The author Bob Phillips began a journalistic career by working for the highly regarded World Sports magazine. He was editor of the British Olympic Association's Official Report of the 1968 Mexico Olympics. He later turned to a career in public relations, and concurrently spent 17 years as a member of BBC Radio's athletics commentary team, covering all the major meetings worldwide. He has attended six Olympic Games and has reported on more than a dozen different sports in written or broadcast form. In recent years he has written a series of widely acclaimed books, including histories of the sub-four-minute-mile and of the Commonwealth Games and biographies of the great Czech distance-runner, Emil Zátopek, and of the British 1936 Olympic relay medallist, Bill Roberts