The bargain Olympics that cost just £600k

3:18pm Wednesday 6th August 2008

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On the 60th anniversary of the Olympic Games in London, reporter Mhairi Macfarlane compares the Beijing event to another era when athletes competed on a shoestring budget.

From July 29 to August 14, 1948, Great Britain showed the rest of the world its resilience and spirit by staging the Games in the face of adversity following the Second World War.

Food and petrol rationing were still in force and London was being re-built after years of bombing.

The scant budget of £600,000 was a drop in the ocean compared to the £20 billion that has been ploughed into Beijing 2008.

Whereas China has been transforming its host cities by building state-of-the-art stadia, transport infrastructure and accommodation, the post-war budget was not sufficient to build any of them.

Instead, existing sites were utilised, with Wembley Stadium hosting the opening and closing ceremonies and athletics events.

The football preliminaries were held at Green Pond Road Stadium in Walthamstow, which was Walthamstow Avenue FC’s ground for many years.

The site, often referred to as The Pond had a record attendance during the Olympics with as many as 20,000 on the terraces.

Other football preliminaries were held at the Arsenal Stadium in Highbury and at White Hart Lane in Tottenham.

In the absence of a purpose-built Olympic village, male athletes were put up in military barracks, schools and colleges, while the women had to make do with nursing homes and colleges.

By stark contrast, £20 billion has been spent in China constructing new subway lines, an airport terminal, a light railway, roads and sporting venues.

The main Olympic stadium, which will be used for the opening and closing ceremonies and athletics events, cost £250 million alone, much of which went on the 41,875 tonnes of steel included in the now famous lattice ‘bird’s nest’ design which symbolises a cradle holding the hopes of mankind for the future.

The events of the Second World War meant that German and Japanese athletes were banned from taking part in 1948.

But it was the first time that Communist countries participated.

A total of 59 nations sent athletes, and many countries were represented for the first time, including Burma, Ceylon, Colombia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Panama, Puerto Rico, Syria and Venezuela.

Post-war rationing forced athletes to sustain themselves on a much more meagre diet than we enjoy today.

But they were given extra milk and chocolate, and some Londoners donated part of their own rations to help improve Britain’s chances of scooping gold medals.

The host nation came 12th, with three gold and 23 medals in total.

The 1948 Games were the first ever to be shown on television, although very few people in Great Britain actually owned sets.

Sixty years of advances in technology mean that Beijing 2008 will be watched by billions of people tuning into the events via radio, television, computers and using ipods -– around the clock.