Product Description

London 2012 Olympics is fast approaching, with new developments and plans causing huge excitement the world over. Yet, this multi-million pound corporate extravaganza could not be further from the realities of the 1948 'Ration Book Olympics' which took place with London a bombed out ruin and Britain in deep economic crisis. The resulting games were not only an amazing achievement in terms of organisation, thrift and invention - being the most successful, inexpensive and unpretentious games of the 20th century - but also something for the world to celebrate following the long years of war and strain. After the cynical 1936 Berlin Games, 1948 was a triumph of the Olympic spirit and fair play, when the countries' finest athletes joined together to compete and entertain despite the burgeoning cold war and niggling old disputes. In the vein of Simon Garfield's Our Hidden Lives, The People's Olympics is a fascinating look at an extraordinary event which was for and by the people. Entertaining, revelatory and hugely readable, the book is full of first hand interviews, hilarious anecdotes, and great spirited feats. Here we meet not only the famous names (Fanny Blankers-Koen and Emil Zapotek) but also hear the experiences of all who were involved from tea ladies, through postmen, to locals and spectators. It is a vivid snapshot of a games which will offer food for thought in the run up to London 2012. Janie Hampton has written more than 15 books, from biography to fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Joyce Grenfell. She lives in Oxford.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139831 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 350 pages

Review
Full of surprising facts and curious anecdotes --Evening Standard, 12th May 2008

An enthralling account of an Olympic Games that had one foot in the past, the other in the future --The Independent, 22nd May 2008

Hampton s excellent book should be compulsory reading for everyone organisers and competitors involved in the 2012 Olympics --Daily Mail, 30th May 2008

Review
`...an exemplary piece of historical research...'

Review
'excellent'

Customer Reviews

Glorious Games
I read this book from cover to cover including the appendices and I just loved it. Janie Hampton has managed to capture the essence and quintessence of all the different sports. When she was writing about athletics I found myself convinced that she was an athletics correspondent, on the rowing - well she was up there with Dan Topolski and on the riding, wrestling and sailing I just knew I was reading things written by an expert. I fell in love with Fanny Blankers Koehn, I envied the US diving girls their glorious silky bathing suits, I was entranced by the art of fencing and I wished I'd been in Torbay. The facts, figures and details are so cleverly woven in to the tale that it works really well.

This is a lovely book. It is not often that I can say that unreservedly but it is certainly the case with Janie Hampton's story of the 1948 Olympics. And a story it is, for the extraordinary thing we learn about those Olympic Games is that they really were as homespun as the title of the book suggests. After the Second World War there was on the one hand a tremendous weariness in Britain but on the other there was still a good dose of the make-do and mend culture which contained an innate degree of optimism which pervaded the lead up to the Olympics and went on throughout the Games themselves. The great delight of this book is that it makes you feel as if Janie Hampton was there herself.

First hand accounts from spectators as well as athletes give a worm's eye view of events while Janie Hampton's excellent research and understanding of the time provides the balancing bird's eye view of the historian. So many of the athletes were true amateurs in the way that most readers would be able to identify with and yet they come across as passionate about their sport, professional in their desire to win but refreshingly honest about how much training they had been able to do. Dorothy Manley, one of three British women runners, confessed that her preparation was very low key as she had a full time job in the city as a typist: `I could only train after work for a couple of hours, four evenings a week.' and yet she was competing for Britain against one of the greatest women athletes of all time, the Dutchwoman Fanny Blankers-Koen. You really feel you get to know these women reading this book, as you do the men. And it's not just the Czech runner, Kartopek, with his agonisingly pained style of running but Halliday, the weightlifter who, three years before the Games, had been released from a Japanese POW camp weighing under five stone. These athletes come alive in The Austerity Olympics, as do the boy scouts, the spectators, the organisers and even the journalists managed to make me smile.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in sport, to anyone who has an interest in the period and to everyone else who needs a really good book to take on holiday or to give as a Christmas present.

When Olympians were not so spoiled
I would highly recommend this book. It is really well written, a fascinating topic and will have you laughing all the way round the athletics track. The author has clearly researched her subject well and found some stories which will amuse and entertain even those, like me, who loathe sport in action. In the light of the preparations for the impending Chinese Olympics and all the brouhaha surrounding them, it is a delight to be reminded of how we dull stodgy Brits knew how to put on a good show despite all kinds of deprivation.

A wonderful revelation of the period.
What a great book. More a social commentary than a sports book, but a real lesson on what can be achieved given the political will - combined with genuine public support. Should be required reading for every member of the IOC and the British Government. Simply serves to highlight the obsenity of the 2012 proposals.