1948 Olympic Games by Mike Martineau

The club sat back in trackside seats as Rotarian Mike Martineau of Langley Park Club took a long jump back in time to the 1948 London Olympics. Mike’s father, Bert, had been a competitor in the 50K walk and finished 5^th behind the winner, Sweden’s John Lyunggren, and became the holder of a bronze medal. Then, all finishers received a bronze medal irrespective of the fact they were not third! As Mike ran through his talk he spoke about how different it was for competitors then. His father had been a print warehouseman – very Trade Union orientated being the Father of the Chapel – and struggled to get time off to compete and, like many competitors, travelled to and from the event on public transport. His idea of training was, on his day off, to take a walk from Clapham to Brighton and get the train back.

Mike gave us many humorous and interesting anecdotes, some obviously dug up from the vault, ranging from the heat on the day of the opening ceremony which high jumped to 93F, to the connections of some competitors to well known personalities today. Hugh Laurie’s father was a rower in the team. Although the German’s were not allowed to take part German PoW’s constructed Olympic Way so Germany did have an involvement.

The King and Queen attended the opening ceremony but dived out of the 37 minute closing ceremony and passed the baton to the Duke of Edinburgh to perform; the shooting season had started at Balmoral! Even in those days there was doom and gloom about the ability to stage the games – it would cost too much, transport would not cope but in the end it cost the government nothing and made a profit of £30,000 after being a great success. Did we not hear this in the build up to 2012?

Rotarian Robin Poll gave a marathon vote of thanks, shooting a few lines on the way but overall it went swimmingly and we didn’t have to race off afterwards. More seriously, before Robin starts rowing with me, he echoed the Club’s thanks to Mike for a very entertaining and interesting talk.

Shame that our Tec bloke, Geoff, had to wrestle with the computer to get the film footage and, in the end, he had to submit.