Hans Bollmann, the head of the Nazi sportswriters association, insisted journalists reporting the Games should be totally committed to National Socialism, drawing, he wrote, on the Nazi imperatives of ‘Volk [people], race, blood, and soil’.
On 16 July, the Turkish and Brazilian contingents arrived at the Olympic Village.
The Manhattan maintained her course for Europe. On board, most competitors, American officials noted, went ‘through their training program almost as they would at home’ (although Stephens lapped the deck again). Space had been allocated on several decks for training and it gave the ship ‘the appearance of a floating gymnasium’.60
In the afternoon Brundage addressed the team. He said the deeds accomplished in Berlin would make these Games long remembered and some of the men’s track team shouted their approval so rowdily and clapped so loudly that Brundage halted. Once they had settled down again he explained that each of them would have to take the Olympic Oath at the Games and he read it out. He also explained that the team did not have the facility to provide each competitor with their own coach but added that the competitors knew what to do anyway. He wished them luck.
Brundage added that when he sailed to Stockholm for the 1912 Games he saw ‘several of his comrades destroy their chances by eating too much. Exposure to the unlimited menus on shipboard was fatal to some,’ he said: medals had been lost at the dinner table.61
That raised a problem for many because, by definition, they were active or hyperactive and bored by the shipboard rhythm. The diary Helen Stephens kept is extremely eloquent about how mundane things filled most people’s days. They certainly couldn’t train as they would have on dry land, burning off the calories, and they discovered what every seasoned transatlantic passenger knew: on a ship the food is rich, plentiful and a too-tempting way to pass the time.
Wykoff, an experienced competitor, understood exactly what Brundage was getting at because on the ship to Amsterdam in 1928 he’d put on 10lb and was determined not to make that mistake again – especially since he found the food on the Manhattan ‘swell’. But Donald Ray Lash, a 5,000-metre runner from the University of Indiana, put on 1lb a day – 10lb over the duration of the voyage – and would have a disastrous run in Berlin, finishing thirteenth.
Louis Zamperini beat him but only by six places, having himself put on 12lb. Being a kid from the Depression, Zamperini had never even bought a sandwich from a drugstore and here he suddenly was taking the train from California to New York and the Manhattan. The adventure of the travel seemed more exciting than the prospect of the Games themselves and the food more exciting still: it was free and with his bacon and egg at breakfast he’d have about seven sweet (say, cinnamon or caramel) rolls. ‘My eyes were like saucers.’62 Williams remembered having the sweet rolls before breakfast, then breakfast from the menu, lunch, a tea break, supper and at 10 p.m. more food which passengers could ‘pig out’ on. He estimated he gained 8 or 9lb during the voyage.
Ellison ‘Tarzan’ Brown, a Narraganset Indian and marathon runner, put on 14lb, suffered an Achilles tendon injury because of the extra weight and got no further than 2 miles into the marathon. Owens, by contrast, dealt with ‘his boredom, homesickness and anxiety by sleeping, not by eating foolishly’.63
There were things to do. Gertrude Wilhemsen, javelin and discus thrower, remembered that Owens ‘asked me to be his shuffle board partner on the ship. I was thrilled! A green farm girl being a team mate of Jesse Owens! Jesse was my hero and I gave up a chance of meeting Hitler to see Owens compete in his events.’64
After Brundage had spoken, an official handed out a list of conduct rules and mail from home then four of the girls, including Stephens, had to don their running gear and go on deck for a photo shoot.
That night the ship hit a storm and several athletes were very seasick, including Owens. Velma Dunn remembers, ‘The voyage was a little rough because ships in those days were not stabilised, but other than that it was fine. I met Jesse Owens on the ship but I didn’t make too much of him at that time because being a diver I wasn’t into track and field so he was just one of the athletes and nobody knew what he was going to do in Berlin.’65
On Friday 17 July, a coach, Dee Boeckmann, seemed preoccupied. The athletes gathered to watch film of the Olympic trials and afterwards Boeckmann asked Stephens to come by her cabin. There, Boeckmann wanted to know if Eleanor Holm was ‘influencing’ any of the other girls by stirring up trouble. Evidently, Stephens had received protest letters about anti-Semitism in the German team and Boeckmann said Brundage wanted to see them because they could auger trouble in Berlin.66
Through it all the Manhattan kept on coming.
The torch relay was being prepared. German broadcasters made their way towards Olympia for the start but the rough roads and tracks slowed them down, to 10 miles an hour.
The Egyptian team arrived at the Village.
Fritz Wandt recalls:
[there was a building called] the Bastion, a small round kiosk in the middle of the Village where the sportsmen could meet at night and have a (non-alcoholic) drink for which they had to pay. From that Bastion they had a wonderful view of the Village, the forest, the lake with the sauna or to the reception building or to the Speisehaus der Nationen (restaurant of the nations).
Some of the dining halls were for up to 150 persons – for the bigger national teams. The Americans were more than 300 and they couldn’t eat all at the same time, of course. The dining halls all looked out onto the terrace. Only the sportsmen from a few countries were allowed to have alcoholic drinks, like the Dutch and the Belgians who drank beer and the Italians and the French who preferred wine.
The sportsmen also met in the Hindenburghaus where 500 to 600 people could sit each night in the great hall and watch cultural events. The most famous artists would come from Berlin and present singing or dancing programmes.
And there was a ring of birches around a small paved area next to the Bastion where orchestras – Navy, Air Force or other military – would play each day. They came from all over Germany. At noon they played at the Speisehaus and, in the evenings, in the ring of birch trees. They played all sorts of music.67
In Berlin a ‘Laughter Week’ ordered ‘jollity and cheerfulness’ to help the citizenry prepare for the rigours of the Games. They were instructed to wear friendly faces for all the Olympic guests due any moment now.
From the Manhattan Wykoff wrote a letter to Frederick Graham, sports editor of his local paper, the News-Press, in Glendale, California expressing thanks for all he had done. He said that thus far everything had been perfect and added, delightfully, a request to be forgiven for the state of his handwriting: he was not, he insisted, drunk; it was the result of the motion of the Manhattan.
Later that day others were to be much less sober than Wykoff. Eleanor Holm discovered the ease of moving between the classes on the ship and found a bar in First Class on A Deck, a haunt of reporters, which suited her. She fell in with a journalist and playwright who, recently remarried, was escaping a feud with his first wife. He liked a drink, she liked a drink, journalists like a drink and they had a party that Friday night. One report suggests the owner of the ship invited her and it began as a cocktail party.68 At one point someone approached her at the bar, where she was drinking champagne, and said she really ought to go to bed. ‘Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team, or did I?’ The party lasted until 6 a.m. when Holm was seen being carried back to her cabin.
This became one of the biggest stories of the whole Games and Velma Dunn gives it some perspective.
[Holm] was from Los Angeles and she trained at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, so did I and she was one of the most generous persons I have ever known for giving her time and helping others. Let’s say somebody was a backstroker. If they were there for practice and having a bit of trouble with their stroke or something she would spend her time helping them. She was very good looking in a provocative way. That would be fair to say. Sexy, th
at’s right.
You have to remember she was married at the time and she was a nightclub singer. Part of her life was singing and drinking and many of her friends were on the ship same as we were, except that they were up in First Class. She thought nothing of going up to First Class at night and being with her friends. That wasn’t my life! I’d never done that! But it was her regular life. I think that to anybody working in a nightclub liking a drink would be part of it.
If she had competed it was a kind of foregone conclusion she would have won a gold medal because she was just an excellent swimmer. She was a natural swimmer. Many of us had to work for whatever we got.69
Holm was not alone in flouting the team rules about training and curfews; members of the hockey and fencing squads drank and stayed up late, too.
The American Olympic Committee members on the ship faced a crisis. Failure to act would likely lead to a breakdown of discipline and a minority wanted the offenders removed from the team immediately. Instead, warnings were issued that anyone offending again would be put ashore at Cobh. At this stage no competitors were named although subsequently Brundage confirmed he had offered Holm a second and final chance.
Brundage comprehended the difficulty of having a rigid set of rules for the conduct of so many competitors, ranging in age from thirteen to forty. ‘We are making all reasonable allowances. We are not prudish nor do we have any objection to a glass of beer or smoking by athletes who know how to behave generally and not disrupt the team’s morale and discipline. Now it’s up to the members of the team to show they mean business.’
In the Olympic Village, with so many athletes already arrived, training schedules caused problems because the time for each team’s squads at the stadium and pool had to be limited. At least the weather improved, the cold and damp giving way to something like a heatwave. The South Americans, so unused to the cold, welcomed this although the Peruvian team suffered problems acclimatising from the altitude of home. They caught colds and tonsillitis.
The Japanese continued to be secretive and inscrutable. Their football team scaled the perimeter fence of the Village at 4 a.m. one morning to practise on a pitch a mile away.
India would play eight practice hockey matches before the competition proper began, but they lost the first of them 4–1 to a German select team. The contrast in styles was marked, the Germans direct and robust, the Indians relying on ‘short passes, dribbling and planned movement’. The Indians consoled themselves with the thought that although the Germans were strong, they had time to improve.70
On Saturday 18 July the competitors on the Manhattan attended the Captain’s Ball, a lively occasion which seems to have pleased those who went. The athletes behaved impeccably so that, as a reward, the 10 p.m. curfew was extended to midnight. Brundage said publicly the matter of the rule breakers was closed.
Eleanor Holm did not say anything publicly – yet.
Sometime during the voyage – perhaps this Saturday, perhaps the day after – the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Athletic Union mentioned to a gathering of athletes plans for a post-Olympic tour. With so much already on their minds they almost certainly did not understand the significance of this and, anyway, with each day bringing them nearer Berlin, who could conceivably be looking beyond the Games?
On Sunday 19 July, as the Manhattan finally drew towards the Irish coast the athletes were doing light training. Some attended church services.
Owens had caught a cold bad enough to make him visit a doctor but by this fifth day he was feeling better, however much the shipboard confinement and routine bored him. He even slept one whole afternoon.71
The day’s amateur hour parodied a well-known radio programme and shipboard fun featured a variety show in the evening with spoof weddings and funerals. Two boxers brought the house down with a dance routine, gymnasts yodelled and a female hurdler sang the blues. Eleanor Holm was no prude but certainly shrewd and, as she watched, she may well have concluded the spoof weddings provided her with ammunition.
The twin themes – politics raw in tooth and claw, the youth of the world preparing to play – flowed on. In Spain, General Franco arrived in Cadiz at the head of Spanish foreign legionaries, an event that highlighted a sad little footnote to the Berlin Olympics. Spain attempted to set up an alternative to the Nazi Games, in Barcelona, from this day to 26 July. Trade unions, communists and socialist parties from all over the world offered their backing. Free room and board were promised but competitors had to get there under their own steam. Apart from sport the programme included chess, musical and theatrical events. Teams from the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Italy did attend – almost exclusively communists in exile and socialists. The alternative Games did happen, however low key, and were even more subdued because with the Spanish Civil War tightening its grip on the country Republicans and Nationalists were exchanging fire all over Barcelona. Canadian boxers Luftspring and Yack intended to compete but when they reached Dieppe they heard they had been cancelled.
The workouts on the Manhattan’s hard deck damaged Stephens’s shins, requiring treatment and rest.
On Monday 20 July the Finns arrived at the Village and by now the viciously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, its pages until then on dis- play in glass cases on street corners all over Berlin, had disappeared. Rumours suggested that Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry or even Hitler himself might have bought it to soften its tone or ordered it off the streets altogether. Some of the glass cases came down, others were being used for different publications.
The torch relay was due to start at noon at Olympia from the first Olympic stadium, among olive groves and pine trees and ruined temples. To ensure the torch’s smooth journey, nothing had been left to chance.
Certain delays had to be allowed for, and for this reason an additional two-hour period was inserted for each 80–100 kilometres, these intervals being utilised in the larger cities for special ceremonies. In the case of slight delays, such a programme could continue until the runner arrived with the Olympic Fire. In every case the runners had to depart punctually and the entire relay run had to be organised so that the final torch bearer would enter the Olympic Stadium [in Berlin] at the proper moment during the opening ceremony.72
The special ceremonies ‘constituted an effective introduction to the Olympic Games’.
A model programme was sent to each town to be used as a general basis for the ceremonies. This programme included the following events: arrival of the runner, ignition of the Olympic Fire, singing of the hymn, ‘Burn, Olympic Flame,’ address by the Mayor, general singing, gymnastic exercises by the men, women and children, sporting demonstrations, singing of the Olympic Hymn, festive address dealing with the Olympic Games, folk dancing, folk songs, preparation for the departure of the next runner, words of consecration, singing of the national anthem, departure of the runner, pealing of the bells. Outlines for the address were also prepared in various languages.73
Beyond this, the National Committees could make whatever arrangements they wanted for these ceremonies.
While the whole world watched, the German Organising Committee felt that each of the 3,075 runners believed they were a living expression of the Olympic ideals, each would understand the symbolic importance of it, and each feel the link between ancient and modern.
At Olympia, buglers welcomed the day and dignitaries from all over Greece gathered. Thirteen Greek maidens ‘in short, belted smocks of rough serge’ supposedly resembling robes worn by ancient priestesses, entered the stadium through a covered passageway.74 A magnifying glass, positioned on a stand, refracted sunlight creating a fire into which one of the maidens dipped her torch. In procession, the other maidens followed her to a Fire Altar outside the stadium where the dignitaries and the first runner, Kyril Kondylis, waited. She lit the fire on the altar.
The German Chargé d’Affaires watched, as did a crew from the German Broadcasting Company, journalists from far and wide, and film-maker Leni Riefenstahl. A favourite
of Hitler and already well known for recording a Nuremberg rally, she was embarking on a lavish documentary of the whole Games. The local mayor and a Greek government representative spoke, a message from de Coubertin was read. It praised the relay run and requested the ‘youth assembled in Berlin accept the heritage of my work – that the bond between the physical and intellectual forces may be sealed eternally for the progress and honour of humanity’. A gun was fired and ancient instruments accompanied a hymn.
As the moments ticked towards noon and reports reached the German Organising Committee that the run was generating mounting anticipation in all the countries and places through which it would pass, Kondylis, dressed in shoes and shorts, came forward and prepared for the solemn moment that would unite past, present and future.
The broadcasting crew preparing to cover the moment comprised three radio reporters, three engineers and three drivers. They had flown to Athens while a heavy cross-country transmitting car, adorned with the five Olympic rings, and a saloon car went by rail. Now microphones were set up.
At noon Berlin called.
Kondylis lit his torch from the altar.
In Berlin, the loudspeakers relayed the commentary from the transmitting car into the crowd that had gathered in the broad square in front of the town hall.
Kondylis turned and set off on the first of thirty-seven handovers to a place called Pont Ladon. The relay would pass through there at 3.15 p.m., and so on through fifty handovers to a place called Vytina, and with each footfall the sense of anticipation increased. The radio crew departed immediately for Athens and from then the supply of hourly bulletins heightened the excitement.
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