More Than Just Sport? Wales at the Olympics

The Olympic Games come on a grand scale,

so vast, only the biggest need apply.

Olympic budgets are calculated by the billion.

So, too, the television audience.

This is sport subjected to huge pressures,

to protest global in size.

And yet the massive is only a compilation of individuals,

each with a tale.

This is the story of a small land

and our part in the biggest show on earth.

The Olympics,

designed as a safe haven for men from the cares of the world.

It couldn't last.

This week, the Olympic sport of wrestling with the real world,

how politics couldn't be kept out of sport.

You do have this one window of opportunity every four years,

and to have that snatched away from you

by politicians seems to me very unfair.

How women said, "Why should we be kept out of the Games?"

Nicole Cooke is the Olympic road race champion! The gold medal is hers.

And the Paralympians - they, too had a point to prove.

And try stopping our Tanni in full flight.

No-one had a clue what the Paralympics meant.

You know, there was no media coverage,

it was really hard to get into a club

and most people's attitude towards disabled people doing sport was,

"Oh, isn't that lovely."

May I introduce you to Georgia Davis of Swansea,

who'll be competing at her first Olympic Games in London,

in the women's 100 metre backstroke.

Georgia is fully funded.

She can train every day, twice, three times a day.

And if she wins gold, she'll be the first Welsh swimmer

to do so in more than 100 years.

Had Georgia been swimming at the Stockholm Games of 1912,

she'd have competed in an open-air pool, without lanes.

She'd have worn this, made of silk and so see-through

that she'd have needed a chaperone to escort her wherever she went in costume.

100 years ago, the Suffragettes had a police escort.

The struggle for women's right to vote,

the march towards equality had begun

but the man behind the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,

did not approve of women at his Games.

He said that the inclusion of women would be uninteresting,

impractical, unaesthetic and incorrect.

Women were considered rather weak and, in those days,

if a woman ran more than 400 metres,

she was likely to drop down dead.

There were all kinds of theories about if women ran more than

something like 100 metres,

they would no longer be able to conceive.

Some people believed if they got 200-300 metres,

they would probably explode.

Given the fact that they really weren't allowed to train very much,

there wasn't much facility

to train in the same way the male athletes did,

it's not really surprising that then they played into the hands

of these myths about fragile little women

who needed protecting and shouldn't be seen to sweat in public.

But women had begun to compete at these manly Olympics.

There are some kind of significant milestones.

By the time we get to 1900 in Paris,

women are allowed to do fairly ladylike sports -

golf, croquet, lawn tennis.

1912 - they're allowed to swim,

which must have been quite a breakthrough.

Irene Steer - Wales's first female gold-medal winner.

Irene was from Cardiff and could use the Corporation baths

but most of her training was done in Roath Park lake.

There were precious few facilities for swimming and, of course,

in Wales, there was very little competition.

So it was very hard for her and how she managed to achieve

the levels that she did is beyond my understanding, really.

In these pioneering days, everything was against Irene, it seemed,

including her shoe size.

I remember when we were in Southport for the trials,

we went to the trials to be picked.

We were walking along the front, a whole lot of us girls, arm in arm,

and I had very small feet in those days.

And they said,

"Oh, well, you don't expect to win anything with those feet, do you?"

They took one look at her and said,

"Well, we don't have to worry about her."

But of course they didn't know Grandma.

Grandma and her small feet were selected for the Stockholm Games...

..and the team set sail.

The team, plus the chaperone - the one in the middle.

She was a pretty severe-looking lady, I think.

I don't know whether she was there to control them

through her experience, et cetera or not.

When you see what they wore

you realise why they might have needed a bit of protection.

It's made from pure silk, it's dark navy

so it was a kind of bra and pants,

with an over-costume to the elbow and mid-side.

But it's completely transparent!

At Stockholm, the women's 4x100 metre freestyle relay was so new

that the winning British team set the event's first world record.

Irene then swam in the individual 100 metres,

a freestyle free-for-all.

In those days, there were no ropes, no lane definition.

And on the turn, she collides with a German girl.

The German team make a complaint and Irene is disqualified from the final.

Absolutely devastated, has to sit out and watch the Australian win gold,

knowing that she would have been among the medals.

Irene nevertheless returned from the 1912 Olympics to great acclaim.

She'd always enjoyed watching Cardiff City

and now she married the chairman.

But it is her swimming that truly sets her apart.

Irene Steer's achievement of being the first woman from Wales

at the Olympics to win a medal...

I mean, it's absolutely monumental.

Swimming, as she was,

against not just her own competitors in the pool,

but also against a whole tide of male-dominated attitudes.

You're looking at a period for women where they don't even have the vote.

It's the Downton Abbey era where women are decorative and,

you know, the kind of competitive spirit might be seen as aggressive.

So that's what makes our early Welsh heroines like Irene Steer so remarkable.

Times have changed.

Not every country allows their women to go to the Olympics

but in Wales they have the chance, and perhaps Welsh women

are on course to win more medals in London than Welsh men.

In the women's triathlon, for example,

where Helen Jenkins is the reigning world champion...

Jenkins wins in Hyde Park!

..Victoria Thornley in the women's eight,

sailor Hannah Mills in the 470 class,

Jade Jones in taekwondo,

and Nicole Cooke, Britain's first gold medallist in Beijing.

Here's the link.

Everything nowadays is geared towards high performance,

from training routines to fashion shows.

The swimwear is by Stella McCartney,

the fabric is man-made nylon, a blend of polyamides and elastane.

100 years ago, Irene Steer, under a watchful eye,

put on her costume of finest natural silk

and this became pure costume drama.

Let me show you something.

That is what you'd have been wearing 100 years ago.

What do you think?

-Er, looks quite flimsy.

-Flimsy.

-Quite see-through.

-Very see-through.

-Not much support.

Not so flimsy, because for 96 years,

until Nicole Cooke won in 2008, no Welsh woman won an Olympic gold.

Irene Steer, heroine of her age, hero of any age.

I've been doing sport all my life

and I can't imagine living in a time where I wasn't allowed to compete,

and then watching men compete. I just find it so unfair

but definitely all the fighting that the women did back then

paid off and I'm just glad that I can be taking part now.

Do you think you'd have been on the militant wing out there?

Yeah, I think so. I definitely wouldn't be able to sit back

and just sort of suffer in silence.

Women forced the men of the Olympics to have a rethink.

Men had to admit their male-only model was wrong and they reacted.

But sometimes the Olympics can take the initiative.

Without the Olympics, there would be no parallel Olympics -

the Paralympics.

In 1948, a wheelchair games was held at Stoke Mandeville Hospital

in Buckinghamshire,

mostly for servicemen injured in the Second World War.

The Paralympic take-up was gradual -

400 competitors in Rome in 1960,

1,500 in Montreal in 1976.

And then they put these games straight after the Olympics.

The 1988 Paralympics have opened in Seoul.

The para-revolution began - the Olympics, then the Paralympics.

And Wales, for the past two decades, has been churning out the champions.

Oh, what a good swim by Dave Roberts!

That was some race.

11 gold medals, equalling the record of this athlete.

Tanni Grey-Thompson does it. Another gold medal for her.

Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson of Eaglescliffe.

Tanni Grey storms through in the last 50 metres.

A title to go with the 16 medals, including those 11 golds,

won at five Games.

The Paralympics were expanding fast

and this was the woman in the driving seat.

In the space of 24 years,

the Paralympics has gone through as big a growth

as just about any sport in the world.

I think in Paralympic terms,

we've probably squashed 100 years of development

into a quarter of a century.

So, Seoul in '88, nobody really came to watch.

Nobody had any idea what the word Paralympic meant.

I remember competing there

and various churches were drafted in to support the teams.

They were obviously given the same tickets for the same seats every day,

but every day they decided to support different countries.

So one day it was Britain, the next it was Germany and, you know,

that was... There wasn't really any atmosphere and no media coverage,

and it was quite hard on the athletes.

But in four years to Barcelona '92,

there was a massive change.

So, you know, with each four years there's been this massive evolution.

So by the time it got to Beijing in 2008, then, actually,

people were coming to watch and I think in London 2012,

the fact that nearly 1.2 million tickets have been sold

has taken it to a whole new level. And it can still get better.

I know that we'll have really made it in Paralympic sport

not when we have the first athlete with a million-dollar shoe contract,

but when we have the 10th, the 15th, the 20th athlete with that.

We're not there yet but we're going to be there really, really soon.

Nathan Stephens of Kenfig Hill.

When he was nine, he lost his legs after an accident on a railway line.

Nathan relaunched himself into sports,

throwing in the summer, on ice in the winter,

as a sledge hockey player, good enough to compete

at the Turin Winter Paralympics of 2006.

He competed at the Beijing Games in the discus, shot and javelin.

From being a non-disabled kid losing my legs

and seeing what it's done for me over the years,

it has given me that lease of life

and I know it's given so many other kids

that chance to be the best, you know, to push themselves.

It just opens so many doors. It knocks down so many barriers.

Obviously, me lying in a hospital bed,

not knowing if I could do sport again,

and then it just opened this whole new world for me.

Right now, if someone asked me,

"Right now I could give you your legs back - would you have it?"

I'd turn round to them and say no because

the people that I've met,

the experience that I've gained over the years,

I've got a beautiful life.

I'm number one in my sport and I've made a career for myself,

and made my family proud.

And I wouldn't give that away for nothing.

Since then, he's become world champion in the javelin.

From missing out on the bronze medal in Beijing,

from winning the gold in New Zealand,

and now to defend my title on home ground,

yeah, there's added pressure but also that added support.

My mentality of not giving up

and going out there to do everybody proud...

I ain't going to let nobody take that from me on home soil.

Paralympians, women - they could knock on the door of the Olympics

and be allowed in, for sport.

The Olympics still wanted to stand apart from real life,

but protest and politics were coming to the Games.

MUSIC: "Express Yourself" by Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band

The 1960s - a decade of contrasts.

Free love

and social upheaval,

protests against the Vietnam War,

student riots...

..and the black power struggle.

We're non-violent with people who are non-violent with us.

The Olympic Games of 1968 went high,

to 7,000 feet above sea level - Mexico City

- where protesting students were killed before the Games began.

Lynn Davies of Wales was defending the long jump title he'd won

in Tokyo in 1964,

only for Bob Beamon to sail through the thin air

and break the world record by more than half a metre.

Even more memorable were the events surrounding the 200 metre final,

won by Tommy Smith with John Carlos, also of the United States,

taking the bronze.

After the race, came the medal ceremony.

A lot of the black American athletes felt that they were privileged

in being part of the Olympic Games and had that opportunity.

But back home they were nothing, unemployed, couldn't get jobs and everything else.

So we sensed that when Smith and Carlos, who were brilliant athletes,

said they were going to make some kind of statement,

we had an indication that it was something about

the black movement in America.

MUSIC: "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed

It was very quiet and very still and almost very eerie.

It was a very dignified protest.

I remember seeing it at the time and being very struck by it.

I think they had their heads bent down and their arms raised.

The Mexican crowd didn't really understand

what these guys were doing because normally,

if an American wins a gold medal,

he stands on that rostrum with his hand on his heart,

looking up at the American flag and singing the American anthem.

Well, these two guys stood on the rostrum

and denied the flag and the anthem.

They were making a statement and they were showing great bravery,

because normally sportsmen and women, Olympic contestants,

are solely focused on doing the very best that they can,

in their chosen sport, to the best of their ability.

They're not thinking about society,

or the morality, or the issues involved.

DAVID COLEMAN: Do you think the Olympics are the right place

to do this, that you ought to use this as a kind of world stage?

David, since we are athletes,

although I am a teacher but I'm not a politician,

we used this so the whole world could see

the poverty of the black man in America.

A defiant gesture by Americans aimed at America.

32 years earlier,

the Berlin Games were supposed to be a showcase

for the White Aryan supremacy that underpinned Nazi ideology,

only for Jesse Owens, born into poverty in Oakville, Alabama,

to win four gold medals.

In 1972, the Games were hosted by Munich in West Germany, new Germany.

These would be the Games free of care, not political but technical.

Germany had the know-how to cover Olympics sport

as it had never been covered before.

The world would revel in all seven of Mark Spitz's

gold medals in the pool.

Wales had the manpower on horseback - David Broome and Richard Meade.

Lynn Davies was GB team captain at his third Games.

Two generations on, the German people wanted to welcome the world

in a new Germany and the organisation was brilliant.

The Olympic village was superb, everything was perfect and laid on,

and we were looking forward to, you know, a brilliant Olympic Games.

Everything changed on September 5th.

Because these were the carefree Games,

security around the athletes' village was deliberately light -

light enough for eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group

Black September to pass through.

In the night, what looked like athletes had climbed over the fence,

dressed in tracksuits, carrying bags with machine guns in them.

And the guards thought that they were athletes

coming from a late night party, at two o'clock in the morning.

11 Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage.

Demands were made -

the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israel and

the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army faction in Germany.

And then, for 18 hours, the world watched.

I went out walking around and ended up at the point where

a whole lot of people were sitting on the bank watching,

when we actually saw the terrorists with their balaclavas

in the window of the Israeli flat, where they all were.

I was walking to breakfast, with Mary Peters from Northern Ireland,

and we looked up and there was a guy standing up in the balcony with a machine gun and mask over his head.

Mary said, "Look," and I looked up and, of course,

I mean, we thought it was a security guard.

It was an extraordinary situation because there we were,

sitting, watching something that was

potentially very dangerous and tragic.

And yet there was absolutely nothing any of us could do.

The stand-off ended when a deal was apparently struck.

A plane would be laid on.

The terrorists and hostages were taken to Furstenfeldbruck,

a nearby NATO airbase,

where the German authorities launched an assault.

Five of the eight terrorists were killed.

It was at first reported that the hostages were safe.

But then the truth emerged.

They have now said that there were 11 hostages.

Two were killed in their rooms this morn... yesterday morning.

Nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.

It was too close...

I mean, you know, that could've been anybody, couldn't it?

I mean, these are guys who have come to the Olympics to compete

and for this to happen...

I mean, you know, it wasn't part of our world or anything

and we were absolutely shattered about it.

It did affect everybody.

It just cast a... Well, you can imagine how we all felt, you know.

On the one hand, your mind is on...

running and jumping in the Olympic Stadium.

On the other hand, you've got these awful mixed feelings

about this could, you know... Is this the end of the Olympic Games?

In Munich, a day of mourning was held. Could the Games go on?

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage,

gave the answer.

I am sure the public will agree that we cannot allow

a handful of terrorists to destroy

this nucleus of international cooperation and goodwill.

APPLAUSE

The Games must go on!

Were you surprised that the Games carried on at all?

No, I think it was absolutely right that they did.

They had the day of mourning and then they carried on,

and I think it was right.

Do you wish that the Games had ended?

Yes, I do.

I wish they would have ended but it's not our decision.

What we can do is just take the rest of the team and go home.

The next Olympics and a new kind of trouble.

These were the Games that bankrupted the host city, Montreal.

And more trouble - the New Zealand All Blacks

went on rugby tour to apartheid South Africa.

New Zealand were not barred from the Games

so 28 African countries withdrew from the Olympics.

Montreal had some sporting highlights

but the cost was greater than the reward,

and the rot hadn't yet stopped.

1980 - another Games, another political storm.

The limited boycott of '76 threatened to become a no-show,

with the very survival of the Olympics at stake.

And in the bitter fallout in Britain from these geopolitical tensions,

two Welsh voices.

Lynn Davies, long jump gold medallist in 1964,

was now team manager for the Moscow Games,

while Dick Palmer from Pembrokeshire was the chef de mission.

After the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet forces in December 1979,

US president Jimmy Carter said that without their withdrawal,

the Americans would boycott the Moscow Games.

And in Britain, a similar political squeeze was on.

The Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, put immense pressure on us

and the British Olympic Association to boycott those Games.

We know we're asking something very difficult when we say,

and we're quite clear about this, that it's not in the British interest

that British athletes should go to Moscow when

the Soviet Union is still committing aggression against Afghanistan.

I think Lynn Davies and Dick Palmer were put in a very difficult,

if not impossible, position, by the government in 1980.

We were being pilloried in the press.

The media were on the phone all the time, asking questions,

"Why doesn't the IOC cancel the Games?

"Why doesn't it delay it?" and so on.

But there was such interest in the press and, basically,

it was interest against us. It was negative.

The British Olympic Association made a very strong stand

and defended the Olympic Games saying,

"This is above politics. This is about sport.

"Politicians shouldn't interfere with the Olympic Games."

Sport as a sanctuary free of worldly cares, it could never be,

not in the Cold War world

where sport was a symbol of national strength.

This was political.

The government's policy on the Moscow Olympics

is tonight on trial in the House of Commons.

The US sent a delegation to tighten the squeeze.

But the beleaguered British Olympic Association did have a defence.

Why pick on sport when the West was happily carrying on trading with the Soviet Union?

Accused of hypocrisy,

the Tory top brass summoned Dick Palmer to Downing Street.

Facing us was Lord Carrington, Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd,

and Heseltine really ripped into us.

Really was... said we were disloyal,

we were sending politicians and particularly the Prime Minister

in an embarrassing situation in the international corridors of power and so on.

And really was very unpleasant to us.

British athletes eventually competed in Moscow

under the banner of the BOA.

It was decided they should keep their heads down at the opening ceremony,

leaving one West Walian as a lone flag bearer.

Do you think it was the right decision to go?

I absolutely think it was the right decision to go

because basically nothing changed.

Nothing changed. The only thing that changed was that they wanted to stop the athletes going.

That was the big gesture.

Now, athletes in America - and I know a number of them

- are absolutely vitriolic about the fact that they lost their chance

to compete at the Olympic Games.

All of us here, first of all, are Americans.

And you won't find a more patriotic group anywhere.

We're being sacrificed simply because we're front page news

and it's an election year. Everyone knows that.

To be free of politics or to be engaged with the real world?

It depends on whether you're looking at sport from without or within.

You do have this one window of opportunity every four years,

and to have that snatched away from you by politicians

seems to me very unfair -

a very unfair decision to have to make.

I have a lot of sympathy for any sportsman or woman

who has dedicated their lives and the preceding months and years

to getting themselves to the peak

of their potential achievement and fitness.

But I don't think you can say,

simply because you happen to be wearing an Olympic vest for one country or another,

that you are divorced from life. I just think that's wrong.

Not in a world of its own then.

But still here, right here, about to begin all over again,

surviving against all that has been thrown at it

because the Olympics can still do this.

There are very few places where you can sit down in a cafeteria

and have Russians there, and East Germans there,

and Poles there, and Americans there, in a state of friendship.

And I think the Olympic Games still have a place,

in that it can have these Olympic values about friendship,

about international understanding,

about young people coming together, taking part in sport.

And that is the special thing about the Olympic Games.

Next week - converting inspiration into the performance of a lifetime,

working on the details, the margins, the percentages.

If you don't do everything you can, then you could lose 1%

by the time it comes round to the season.

1% in my race is like a few tenths of a second.

That's something I can't afford to lose.

How to get your head around the moment, your Olympic moment.

My heart's going thinking about it.

It's just, like, you train all year round for one lap.

And what may happen after your Olympic moment.

Nicole's become one of these people that most people do in life,

they don't cope with success.

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