Judge me, but sometimes I think I look forward to the Olympics every four years less for the actual Summer Games than for the update of the The Complete Book of the Olympics that comes out a couple of months earlier. Compiled by David Wallechinsky for years, and in recent years in greater collaboration with his nephew, these doorstoppers (weighing in at more than a thousand pages) brim with the stories of recent and old competitions, rule changes and regulations, and, of course, the detail of every single medal handed out in the modern Olympics. The Rio de Janeiro Games are not far, and there is no better way to refresh yourself for the magnificent contests ahead than by dipping into the history of the last 120 years of Olympic competitions.
It is also a reminder that sport cannot be pared down to only statistics, and be shorn of its human and political drama. The Olympic torch will be lit in Greece this week, and in the course of the following weeks it is scheduled to pass through a refugee camp in Athens. In fact, the International Olympic Committee has allowed refugees to compete and march under its flag.
Bolts from the pastOur wrestlers, boxers and shooters will keep India in the hunt for individual medals — but the star attraction is likely to be Usain Bolt. How fascinating then to roll back and read about the curious story of Allan Wells’s gold medal in 100 metres in Moscow 1980. Before the Olympics, Wallechinsky reminds us, Margaret Thatcher’s government had reportedly tried to persuade him to heed the call for boycott by mailing photographs of dead Afghan children, but his presence must not have ruffled the favourite, in this case a Cuban in the absence of the Americans. In the event, Wells, who had started sprinting seriously just four years earlier and had even started using starting blocks only in 1980, won in a photo-finish, becoming the first Briton since Harold Abrahams to win the 100m and the first Scot since Eric Liddell to win an Olympic gold in track and field ( Chariots of Fire , based on Abrahams and Liddell’s 1924 Olympics victories would be released the next year, in 1981.)
It’s not as if the IOC has a clean record. In 1968 in Mexico City, it browbeat the Americans into banning Tommie Smith and John Carlos from further competition after their Black Power salute during the victory ceremony for the 200m sprint. Smith had just broken the world record, and the expected American one-two finish had been dashed by Australian Peter Norman, who claimed silver. But he rose to the occasion yet more meaningfully by joining the protest and wearing the civil rights badge. And it is one of the loveliest footnotes to that most powerful image at the victory podium that when Norman passed away in 2006, “Smith and Carlos both served as pallbearers at his funeral”.
Indians marched to a different drummer in the years before Independence. As a British colony, their hockey team had to walk in step with the British contingent, but Wallechinsky writes that at Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, they unfurled the Tricolour in the dressing room before going out and beating the Germans in the final 8-1, “with Dhyan Chand scoring six goals while playing barefoot”. In fact, it is a useful reminder that Great Britain did not field a team against the Indians before Independence, for fear of being humbled by one of their colonies. As they may say, what do they know of sport who only sport know?
Age of too much informationIt is also worth speculating about the shelf-life of reference books like Wallechinsky’s. In his latest book, You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia , Jack Lynch argues that “we may be approaching the end of the era of the reference book”. Reference material will surely always be compiled and be made available, but the shift to digitisation and online searches is altering how it is organised. Writes Lynch: “Every technological revolution has shaken up the organisation of information. Advances such as alphabetical order, page numbers, tables of content, and indexes made it possible to organise old information for new purposes — and, as a side effect, revealed the limitations of old technologies.”
Taking off from Rene Descartes’s dream of “all knowledge gathered together”, Lynch, a professor of English at Rutgers University in the U.S., traces the human ambition to collect all the world’s knowledge in one place. The Age of Google may be getting us there, but it is a world that invites great anxiety, not least about the authenticity of information being put out, the multiple ways in which it is organised, the “presentist” bias of online material, and the danger of an information monoculture.
Early in the book, Lynch refers to a librarian’s definition a century ago, that “a reference book is a book which is used for looking up particular points rather than for reading through”. And as we work out how to optimally use the reference material increasingly being made available only online or in digital form, it is difficult to believe that we could actually do without reference material that at least offers the potential of being read right through. Like multiple editions of The Complete Book of the Olympics .
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
