Tory MP Henry “Chips” Channon, attending the Berlin Olympics as a guest of the Third Reich, records in his diary, 6th August 1936:
Our ADC, in a grand car with a Storm Trooper at the wheel, called for us and we whizzed off to the Olympic Stadium, which is really a collection of stadiums. First we watched some indifferent polo, then we walked to the largest stadium of all, and watched hurdling and running, which bored us… Whenever there was a win, the entire stadium stood up and, with right arm uplifted, sang the National Anthem, as best they could, of the victorious country. German wins were frequent, and then, not only “Deutschland über Alles” was bellowed, but also the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi anthem, which I thought had rather a good lilt. Thus an hour or so passed, and then, suddenly, the audience was electrified. Hitler was coming and looked exactly like his caricature—brown uniform, Charlie Chaplin moustache, square, stocky figure… I was more excited than I was when I met Mussolini in 1926 in Perugia, and more stimulated, I am sorry to say, than when I was blessed by the Pope in 1920… Berlin has not known anything like this since the war, and one was conscious of the effort the Germans were making to show the world the grandeur, the permanency and respectability of the new regime.
Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of literature in Dresden, writes in his diary, 13th August 1936:
The Olympiad, which is now ending, is doubly repugnant to me. 1) As an absurd over-estimation of sport; the honour of the nation depends on whether a fellow citizen can jump four inches higher than all the rest. In any case, a Negro from the United States jumped the highest of all and the Jewess Helen Meyer won the fencing silver medal for Germany (I don’t know which is more shameless, her participating as a German of the Third Reich, or the fact that her achievement is claimed for the Third Reich)… No doubt in England and America sport has always been uncommonly and perhaps excessively valued, but probably never so one-sidedly, and at the same time it must also be borne in mind that these sporting countries do not have universal compulsory military service. And 2) I find the Olympics so odious because they are not about sport—in this country, I mean—but are an entirely political enterprise.
In The Austerity Olympics by Janie Hampton, Czech runner Emil Zatopek recalls the London Games, 29th July 1948:
I so wanted to see the opening ceremony at Wembley. But because the 10,000 metres was coming up the very next day, our team leader told me that I was not to tire myself out in the hot sun. But I could not miss this great human celebration. So I crept carefully to the back of our delegation, trying to hide myself behind some of the biggest men as we lined up outside. It was only later, in the stadium itself, that our leader saw me… “Emil,” he was calling, “what are you doing here?” But by then the ceremony was beginning, and I whispered back to him, “The King George is looking at us. How can I go off now?”
David Astor, the new editor of the Observer, writes in an editorial, 8th August 1948:
Enormous crowds, beating the 1936 Berlin record, have packed the Stadium, careless equally of scorching sun and drizzling rain… with limited resources we have managed to offer a hospitable welcome to great numbers of competitors and visitors from abroad. We can take some credit also for having entered a team for every event, including basket-ball and some even more recondite contests… And all this we have done quietly, with none of the nationalistic ostentation which travestied the Olympic spirit in Berlin… we can feel modest pride that the London Games have been one of the most successful of these festivals of sport and quite the most harmonious.
In his autobiography, American sprinter Tommie Smith remembers giving the Black Power salute, 16th October 1968:
I stood on the infield of the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City, with a gold medal around my neck, black socks on my feet, and a glove on the right fist I had thrust in the air. My head was bowed, and inside that bowed head, I prayed—prayed that the next sound I would hear, in the middle of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” would not be a gunshot… I knew there were people, a lot of people, who wanted to kill me for what I was doing. It would only take one of them to put a bullet through me, from somewhere in the crowd of some 100,000, to end my life because I had dared to make my presence—as a black man, as a representative of oppressed people all over America, as spokesman for the ambitious goals of the Olympic Project for Human Rights—known to the world… This was my platform, the one I had earned by years of training my body and mind for the ultimate achievement.
