As the 2012 London Olympics get underway, we looks back at another summer Olympiad in the great English capital, seven decades ago, when the city hosted the 1948 Games.
Taking place just three short years after the end of the Second World War, when much of the city — and indeed, much of Europe — was still rebuilding after the devastation of the 20th century’s most cataclysmic conflict, the fourteenth Olympiad of the modern era was the first held since the 1936 Berlin Games.
While the war was over, however, it was hardly forgotten. Neither Japan nor Germany was allowed to compete. (The third Axis power, Italy, sent more than 200 athletes to London, having — wisely — joined the Allies in the middle of the war after Mussolini was deposed and executed.) The Soviet Union, meanwhile, as LIFE told its readers in August 1945, “snubbed the whole show” — hardly surprising, as the USSR had not sent athletes to an Olympiad since 1922, and would not do so until 1952.
But whatever ideological fault lines existed around the globe in the immediate aftermath of the war, the obvious and overriding emphasis in London in 1948 was the athletes, and the generally friendly, intense competition on display.
Source: LIFE magazine
Post by Coco Pastis
