Canada's greatest Olympics: what really happened in 1928 & More News Here

Canada one time made Olympic historical past that was each splendid and shameful. It was the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, the primary when girls had been admitted to the observe and discipline program. Canadian girls had been key to what ensued, in an occasion that has been infamous for nearly 100 years–and has been significantly misreported and misunderstood for nearly all that point. 

I uncovered the entire confused story for my new e-book, Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told. It was a analysis venture that turned extra like against the law thriller novel. Facts and culprits saved altering. What began as an exhibition of girls’s weak spot turned an indication of males’s dishonesty and prejudice.  

The girls’s 800m at these Games–the primary high-level center distance observe race ever for girls–was taken on the time as proof that ladies should not suited to such assessments of endurance. The world’s media united in condemning the spectacle of “wretched women,” “prostrate and distressed,” collapsing exhausted across the observe and sobbing on the end line. Five of the 11 girls collapsed, and 5 dropped out with out even reaching the end line, wrote one reporter, conscious that precise stats take advantage of convincing journalism. 

In truth, these numbers are proof of the flagrant dishonesty of the sports activities journalism occupation at these Games. They misreported the race in each method. The tales of mass collapse and misery, amazingly constant throughout many worldwide information reviews, had been pretend information, vastly exaggerated, typically grossly inaccurate. There had been 9 girls in the race, not 11. None failed to complete. Four or 5 fell to the grass on the end, sure, however they’d simply run large private bests; two had been sprinters racing their first massive 800.  

Even the movie footage that everyone knows (in documentaries like Free to Run or Spirit of the Marathon) proved to be deceptive, phony proof. I’ll say right here solely that you’re not watching what you suppose you’re watching. 

The litany of lies hid the reality that the race was an important leap ahead in girls’s working. The first three broke the current world report, and the primary seven (sure, seven) ran sooner than the formally ratified world mark at that date, together with two Canadians. That race deserves a revised place in historical past, not as proof of girls’s weak spot, however as a serious breakthrough in elite athletic efficiency. 

The two Canadians had been in the thick of it. Fourth in the ultimate discipline of 9 was 17-year-old Jean (Jenny) Thomson, from Penetanguishene, Ont., in an enormous private greatest 2:21.6. Fifth (2:22.4) was the gifted all-rounder Fanny (Bobbie) Rosenfeld, from Toronto. Also a hockey star, Rosenfeld had already gained the silver medal in the 100m, and went on the be a part of Canada’s world-record breaking gold medal 4 x 100 relay group. 

Rosenfeld’s medals helped Canada end the Amsterdam Games as the highest girls’s observe and discipline group in the medal depend. Ethel Catherwood (Regina) gained the excessive bounce in a world report, and Ethel Smith (Toronto) took bronze in the 100m, for a complete of two gold, two silver, and one bronze, from solely 5 occasions. Or 5 gold medals, in case you depend the relay as 4. Canada’s males additionally did nicely, thanks to 2 dash golds by Percy Williams (Vancouver), gaining 4 in all. It was in all probability Canada’s greatest observe Olympics, edging 1932 (11 medals, however just one gold), thanks largely to the ladies. 

The disgrace, and the thriller: per week later, Canada led the transfer to chop all girls’s observe and discipline occasions from the Olympic program. The Canadian delegates really put that movement. Why? When Canada’s personal girls had carried out so nicely? It happened on the particular worldwide assembly held to determine the way forward for the ladies’s Olympic program, when the air was steamy-hot with all of the sensationalized sexist misreporting of the 800m (“the gals dropped in swooning heaps as if riddled by machine gun fire”), and each journalist was calling (absolutely not by coincidence) for that occasion to be banned. The 800m was minimize from future Olympics by a vote of 12-9. The remaining 4 girls’s occasions had been saved by a 16-6 vote. Canada voted for exclusion each occasions. 

Why did Canada betray its personal medal-winning girls? Envy? Male delegates resentful as a result of the ladies outshone the lads? Politicking towards the rising power of girls’s sport? Rivalry between federations? Plain backward sexism by previous fuddy-duddies? At this distance, we’ll by no means know. But coming so quickly after Canada’s girls proved themselves such a drive, main that destructive vote was not Canada’s proudest Olympic second. 

By the way in which, the legendary Paavo Nurmi additionally fell exhausted to the grass on the end line in these Games. No one referred to as for the lads’s 5000m to be banned. 

The extraordinary story of the 1928 Olympic girls’s 800m is certainly one of 14 nice tales advised (with revisionist new analysis) in Roger Robinson’s Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told (Meyer & Meyer, 2022), $18.95 from bookstores and all on-line suppliers. Based in New Zealand and New York, Roger has written incessantly for Canadian Running. 

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