This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The paris olympics of 1924 had a number of innovations that survive today. There was the first use of the motto of citius, altius, fortius (swifter, higher, stronger), the first radio coverage and the first Olympic Village. The first Winter Games had been held in Chamonix five months earlier and it had the first closing ceremony in which the flag of the next host country was flown. Yet as far as The Times was concerned that summer, the Dutch flag should have stayed furled and the Games of the eighth Olympiad should have been the last.

“Olympic Games doomed” was the headline, followed by the sub-heads “Failure of the ideal” and “Disgraceful scenes”. In a 900-word leading article that described itself as “delivering the funeral oration … of the whole Olympic movement”, the paper decried the lack of brotherly love on display and said the nations of the world clearly hated each other too much for sport.

“It has once more been demonstrated with dreadful clearness,” the paper said, “that the Games exacerbate international bitternesses.” It would be hard to win support for sending a team to the next one, it concluded. To reverse the famous cry on Oscars night 58 years later of the screenwriter who gilded those Games: “The British aren’t coming!”

The Times had been piqued in particular by an incident in the quarter-finals of the middleweight boxing contest when Britain’s Harry Mallin was judged to have lost despite clear evidence of being bitten on the chest by his French opponent. Britain, supported by the other English-speaking countries, threatened to withdraw in protest. Mallin, described by one reporter as “the human roast beef of Old England”, was reinstated and went on to win gold.

this was not the only foul play by the hosts. In the final of the rugby competition, the United States team were pelted with rocks and bottles and fights broke out on the pitch and in the stands. One American spectator was knocked unconscious by a walking stick and the victorious US team required a police escort to reach their changing room. Rugby would not appear in the Olympics again for another 92 years.

You don’t see any of that in Chariots of Fire. More than 40 years after the film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Hugh Hudson’s directorial debut remains a glorious celebration of those Games. It is the story of two British athletes who are both driven and handicapped by their faith: the Jewish Harold Abrahams is seen by the Establishment as unsporting because he engages a professional coach, while devout Christian Eric Liddell refuses to run on a Sunday.

If you haven’t yet watched this feelgood film, make it your summer treat. See if you can spot the cinema debuts of Sir Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Fry and, er, the future England cricket all-rounder Derek Pringle, who were all given cameo roles while students at Cambridge.

britain won nine golds at the 1924 Olympics, which would be our best haul for 76 years, coming fourth behind the US, France and Finland, but there are other athletes at those Games who could have had the film treatment. 

Sir Philip Neame, for instance, was in the British team who won gold in the running deer contest, in which they shot at a moving target. Ten years earlier he received the Victoria Cross for rescuing wounded men under heavy rifle fire and bombing near Neuve Chapelle. 

After the Olympics, promoted to colonel, he went out to India where he was mauled by a tiger and married the woman who nursed him back to health. He commanded troops in Libya in the Second World War and was held as a prisoner of war in Italy. That would make a fine film.

So too would the life of Norris Williams, an American tennis player who won the mixed doubles. He had been on the Titanic, diving into the Atlantic as the ship sank. He was rescued by the Carpathia but suffered such frostbite that the ship’s surgeon wanted to amputate his legs. Williams refused and went on to win two US Opens and that gold medal.

The 1924 Games also featured three swimming golds for Johnny Weissmuller, later better known for playing Tarzan, and Ireland’s first Olympic medal-winner in Jack Butler Yeats, younger brother of the poet, who won the award in the arts and culture contest for his painting of swimmers on the Liffey.

Yet if the last paris olympics are remembered for anything, it is for Liddell and Abrahams, thanks to Chariots of Fire. Screenwriter Colin Welland took some liberties with the story, not least in having the film’s final words — “Well, he did it. He ran them off their feet!” — delivered at the funeral of Abrahams in 1978 by Evelyn Aubrey Montague, who had died 30 years earlier. But it captures perfectly the energy of sporting endeavour, and the virtues of sacrifice and moral courage.

I defy anyone to watch the opening sequence of those pale athletes on the beach, running as Nigel Havers’s character puts it “with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels”, and not feel a surge of that Olympic spirit that The Times had feared was about to vanish. A century on, let us hope that new heroes again emerge in Paris.