Berlin Games (12 page)

Birger Ruud would find glory in the ski-jumping, where he took his second gold medal in the event. His fellow countryman, Ivar Ballangrud, however, won three gold medals and one silver in the speed skating, which made his achievement comparable with that of Jesse Owens in the Summer Games. Ballangrud is one of the forgotten great Olympians. As well as his four medals won at Garmisch, he won a silver medal at Lake Placid, and a gold and a bronze at St Moritz in 1928.

The Americans and the British fared better on the bobsleigh run than on the pistes. In the four-man event, the Americans entered into bobsleigh legend, when during their second run their brake man, James Bickford, was thrown out of the sleigh as it careered down the run at 80 mph. Nevertheless, he managed to hang on with one hand, his body being battered against the ice. One of his teammates, Richard Lawrence, managed to pull Bickford back into the sleigh–surely the stuff of Hollywood–and the team made it down in 1:23, two seconds faster than their first run. Despite such heroics, the team finished sixth, three places behind Britain. The Swiss took gold and
silver. America's greatest achievement was in the two-man event, in which she took both gold and bronze, with the Swiss in second place.

The greatest sporting controversy of the Games was reserved for the ice hockey tournament. Evan Hunter, the BOA secretary, had predicted that there would be an ‘almighty howl' over it, and he was proved right. Ten of the twelve members of the British team lived in Canada but had dual citizenship, and the Canadian team maintained that two of them–goalkeeper Jimmy Foster and Alec Archer–were not even amateurs because they had previously played on professional Canadian teams. Hunter's ‘almighty howl' did indeed break out. The players were suspended, and were reinstated in the British team only after an emergency meeting of the International Ice Hockey Committee. Nevertheless, bad feeling reigned, with A. E. Gilroy, the president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, even referring to British hockey as ‘a racket', an insult that earned him censure on the floor of the Canadian House of Commons. The Canadians had won every Olympic hockey title since 1920, and for the first time they could sense defeat.

The two teams met at 9.45 in the evening of 11 February. By now there were four teams left in the final round: Britain, Canada, the United States and Czechoslovakia. An estimated 15,000 squeezed themselves into the stadium, most of them rooting for the British. The reason for this was more to do with anti-Canadian feeling than a particularly pro-British one. A few days before, Canada had faced Germany in a spectacularly violent and bad-tempered match that had almost caused a riot in the stadium. Both Goering and Goebbels had called for calm over the loudspeakers, an order that was scarcely heeded–one of the few such instances in Nazi Germany. To the Germans' chagrin, the Canadians beat them 6–2. That night the German crowd hoped the British would wreak revenge on behalf of the host nation.

With mounting excitement, the spectators watched the ice being prepared by hand, the sweepers smoothing the surface with huge two-handled spades. Even this mundane act was performed with balletic precision, as the sweepers undertook their tasks in formation. Ice hockey is played over three twenty-minute periods, and after the first period the teams were level at 1–1, with John Davey scoring for Britain,
and Ralph St Germain for Canada. The second period was goalless. The final twenty minutes were even more aggressive than the sport's norm, and the crowd was baying for the British. The Canadians were very strong, and Jimmy Foster had to use every pound of strength and skill to stop the ferocious assaults on his goal. Just as it looked as if the game was going to end in a draw, the British player Edgar Brenchley slotted the puck into the Canadian goal ninety seconds before the whistle. The British won 2–1, a result that was met with ‘a roar of cheers and
Heils
'. Many members of the crowd rushed on to the ice to embrace their new heroes, bursting through the military cordon.

There were plenty more games to play, however, before the band would know which national anthem to practise. Buoyed by their success against the Canadians, the British trounced the Czechs with a 5–0 victory two days later. The Czechs were to suffer an even worse defeat the following day, this time at the sticks of the Canadians, who annihilated them 7–0. Later that day the British drew 0–0 with the United States, who had beaten the Czechs 2–0. With one game to play, between Canada and the United States, the situation was tight. The British had won two and drawn one. The United States had won one and drawn one. The Canadians had won one and lost one. The Czechs, with three defeats, would of course remain in fourth place. The medals depended on the outcome of the final game. If the United States won, then she and Britain would have the same points, but would win gold because of goal advantage. If Canada won, then the British would win gold.

The crucial game started at 2.30 on the afternoon of 16 February. The Canadians were now doubly furious, because two days earlier they had once again fruitlessly taken their grievance with the British to the authorities, this time to the Olympic Ice Hockey Association. The Canadians complained that the points system gave the British an unfair advantage, but their complaint was rejected. Unsurprisingly, the stadium was packed, and the British team sat nervously in the stands, hoping that their enemy would now be their saviour. It was a terrible situation for the Canadians, for if they decided to deprive Britain of gold by deliberately losing the match, then they would also be depriving themselves of the silver medal. To win a mere bronze would be unthinkable. In the first period, David Neville of Canada managed to
score. The British onlookers cheered reservedly–there was a long way to go yet. After the second period, the score remained at 1–0. For the British, the excitement was unbearable. They cheered the Canadians on, willing them to seal the victory with a second goal. The United States counter-attacked strongly, but they never managed to score. Thanks to Neville's goal, the British had won gold.

The Germans fêted the British team, even mobbing them outside their hotel. They were particularly drawn to Jimmy Foster, who had stopped 219 shots on his goal, and had let in a mere three. Meanwhile, the Canadians had to fester. On the floor of the Canadian House of Commons, Thomas Langdon Church, the Conservative member for Toronto-Broadview, himself a veteran sportsman, queried whether the Games were doing Canada any good at all. ‘This government', he said, ‘has appropriated $10,000 for these games and if they are to cause bad relations internationally, if they are to be bad advertising for Canada, I think something should be done. I ask the head of the government to make an investigation of this matter. There were rows before the Canadian sportsmen left, there were rows when they got over and there probably will be rows when they come back.'

As well as the ten Anglo-Canadian hockey players, the ice hockey tournament featured another controversial figure, the twenty-five-year-old German captain Rudi Ball. Like Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann, Ball was one of Tschammer und Osten's token Jews, invited back from a foreign land–in this instance, from exile in Italy–in order to show the world that the Jews were not being discriminated against. The Nazis had to invite Ball, because, like Mayer, he was undoubtedly the leading sportsman in his discipline. Ball had used this to his advantage, although he had played the Nazis better than the impetuous Mayer. He had cut a deal with them, insisting that he would return only if the regime allowed him and his parents to leave the country after the Games. The Germans accepted, not least because Ball's old linemate and best friend, Gustav Jaenecke, refused to play without him. The Germans knew that without Ball and Jaenecke, the team would not stand a chance of victory.

When Ball arrived at Garmisch, he was bemused to find a brass band to welcome him when he stepped off the train. He played well throughout the tournament, ignoring the great fuss made of him.
Unfortunately for the Germans, he was injured in the match against Hungary, and he missed the crucial and ferocious game against Canada. With the Germans taking only fifth place in the tournament, in sporting terms they got a bad deal, but in propaganda terms Ball had served a vital purpose. The following month, Avery Brundage issued a press release in which he used Ball and the five Jews who had represented Austria to hammer the boycotters. ‘If conditions in Germany were truly as represented by the boycotters,' he wrote, ‘why did these Jews participate? The fact is, the Jewish drive in this country [the United States] is incomprehensible to sports leaders in foreign lands. It does not exist beyond our borders.' After the Games, Ball's parents were permitted to emigrate, although Ball stayed in Germany, playing hockey both for Germany and Berliner SC throughout the war. In 1948, he emigrated to South Africa where he became a successful businessman, before dying in 1975.

The closing ceremony took place after the hockey match between the United States and Canada. In front of a reported 130,000 people, Karl von Halt presented the medals, field guns booming as he did so. The militaristic tone was augmented by the presence of an army regiment standing to attention, and the use of navy midshipmen to run the victorious countries' flags up and down the poles. Hitler, Goering and Goebbels watched proudly as the Germans were presented with a total of six medals, which put them in second place behind Norway. The British finished seventh, one place above the United States, which had also picked up a bronze in the 500 metres speed skating. The Canadians had to make do with their single silver, which placed them ninth. After the Olympic flame was extinguished, searchlights lit up the sky in a manner reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies. Unlike at Nuremberg, however, the crowd control at Garmisch was not effective, and there were many reported injuries as the spectators tried to stampede out of the stadium in order to catch a glimpse of Hitler. They were manhandled by soldiers and SS men, and many had their clothes torn or were pushed down into ankle-deep mud and slush.

In fact, the closing ceremony was not the only part of the Winter Games which did not run smoothly. Because of the overcrowding during the ten days, hostelries had been unable to cope. There were often waits of an hour or more before food arrived, and usually the
diners never received the food they had ordered, and had to make do with whatever the waiters had found. The Germans were also unable to cope with a slightly enlarged American team, and Charlie Gevecker from St Louis, a speed skating official, had to sleep in a bath. There was also excessive bureaucracy–dossiers on all the competitors and officials had to be completed in quadruplicate and sometimes more. Joan Dean, a British ice skater who was the non-playing captain of the British ladies' team, found it impossible to secure passes for the parents and guardians of the child athletes. The officials said that all the passes had already been issued. Dean was soon joined at Garmisch by her ice skating partner and husband, Fred, who tried to help his wife secure the passes. ‘It was only after days of argument,' Fred Dean was to write, ‘and by both of us banging the table harder and shouting louder than Ritter von Halt, the organiser and a typically arrogant Nazi, and by threatening to take the whole team back to London, which in point of fact we could not have done, for wild horses could not have stopped the competitors skating, that at last my wife got six cards with “Please admit to all parts of the stadium at all times”.' American journalists hostile to the Nazis, such as William Shirer, also encountered bureaucracy, and were often prevented from entering the stadium whenever Hitler was present, although Shirer admitted that the Games had been ‘a far more pleasant interlude' than he had anticipated. There were, in his opinion, far too many SS and army troops about, but ‘on the whole', he wrote in his diary, ‘the Nazis have done a wonderful propaganda job'.

Peter Lunn's father, Arnold, agreed with Shirer. In an article he wrote after the war, Lunn recalled that ‘the young Nazis were encouraged to believe that a ski race was a competition in which Germans raced to prove, not that they were better skiers than other people, but that Nazism was better than democracy'. In the same article, Lunn accused the Germans of cheating, by closing the downhill course the day before the race, in order that they could practise on it themselves. It is hard to substantiate Lunn's claim. The downhill event took place on 7 February, the day after the opening ceremony. Robert Livermore's diary on the 6th makes no mention of practising or even being denied the opportunity–instead he writes about the opening ceremony. Perhaps the whole day was occupied by preparations for that,
and there was simply no time for training. Certainly, Germany did brilliantly in the Combined Downhill and Slalom–she won gold and silver in both the men's and the women's competitions–but this may have had more to do with her skiers having months of training than sneaking in an extra day on the Neuner. Lunn's bitterness is easy to understand, but the truth is that the Germans had a much more professional approach to training, albeit a full-time approach that saw them skirt dangerously close to violating their athletes' amateur status. The British and American winter sportsmen were amateurs in the truest sense–they were competing for fun, and certainly not for any particular political prestige. As Arnold Lunn had counselled his son, ‘compete seriously, but take the result light-heartedly'. James Palmer-Tomkinson felt that his compatriots would enjoy more success if they took a more gung-ho approach to the pistes. ‘I still believe', he wrote to a friend during the war, ‘that an Englishman is capable of getting somewhere near the top of a big ski race using the good old method of taking a five-to-one chance of holding a really fast line, or falling and finishing down the list. I used to get great amusement baiting the buggers on that subject, as they were always content to go for a mediocre place and get it, but I can't believe they got a quarter as much fun out of it.'