O’Connor traveled to Athens with Con Leahy and two other Irish athletes, John Daly and John McGough. Everyday Irish men and women keen to see Ireland represented at the Olympics had raised money for the athletes’ passage to Athens. In correspondence with Olympic officials, the Irish athletes had made it clear they wished to represent Ireland. But to their great dismay, upon their arrival they learned—by reading souvenir programs, no less—that they were listed with the British delegation.143 The 1906 Athens Games were the first in which athletes had to be affiliated with a National Olympic Committee (NOC) to compete. Ireland was still governed from Westminster at the time and had not yet formed an NOC.144 O’Connor—a working-class clerk for a Waterford solicitor—wrote an appeal and submitted it to the Olympic organizers. He was summarily denied.145 But, as O’Connor’s granddaughter Rosemarie O’Connor Quinn told me: “He was a fiery man. He was not a man to be crossing.”146
For the first time ever the Olympics held an opening ceremony that resembled the flag-waving parades of today’s Games. At this first “March of Nations” the Irish athletes offered a foretaste of the protests to come, sporting bright green blazers embossed with golden shamrocks on the left breast and ornate golden braids along the cuffs and collars.147 They also donned identical green caps emblazoned with a shamrock. The athletes lagged behind the rest of the British contingent, conspicuously distancing themselves from the pack and ignoring the English AAA’s demand that they feature Union Jacks on their sport coats.148
The plot thickened once the athletics competition finally began. In the long jump, O’Connor alleged that Olympic official Matthew Halpin—who doubled as event judge and the manager of the US squad—engaged in biased officiating. According to O’Connor and others at the scene, Halpin allowed US long jumper Myer Prinstein to leapfrog ahead in the jumping order, thereby allowing him to run on a smoother, faster track. Halpin also called O’Connor for fouls on two of his jumps.149 O’Connor later railed to the Limerick Leader: “I was enraged … If my wife had not been present looking on at this contest, which restrained me, I would have beaten Halpin to a pulp as I was half insane over the injustice.”150 On the spot, O’Connor submitted a written appeal, but he was gaining a reputation as a troublemaker and was again denied. He was forced to settle for the silver.151
O’Connor was determined to have the last word on the matter. During the medal ceremony, when the Union Jack was hoisted up the flagpole in honor of his silver-medal performance, O’Connor scampered over to the pole and swiftly shimmied up it. He unfurled a large green flag bearing a golden harp and the words Erin Go Bragh, or Ireland Forever. Below, his teammate Con Leahy waved a similar flag and fended off the Greek police, giving O’Connor more time atop the pole.152 O’Connor later reminisced: “When I climbed a pole about 20 feet in height and remained aloft for some time, waving my large flag and Con waving his from the ground underneath the pole, it caused a great sensation … I was an accomplished gymnast in my youth and my active climbing of the post excited the spectators who had observed my violent protest to Halpin being sole judge and declaring my best jumps foul.”153 O’Connor’s great grandson Mark Quinn later wrote, “The Irishman’s points might well be accredited to Great Britain, but the flying of the Irish flag left none in doubt as to where O’Connor’s true allegiances lay.”154 Quinn told me: “Events dictated that he become political. To not become political would be to submit to British authority.”155 As Rosemarie O’Connor Quinn put it, “Over 800 years of repression and dominance of a colonial power certainly inspired Peter O’Connor to pull down the British flag.”156
Not everyone championed this act of dissent. After describing the incident, the Daily Mail noted, “The question of the flags was the subject of considerable comment both in the Stadium and in the city, the Irishmen’s attitude being universally disapproved.”157 More broadly, O’Connor and Leahy were a vital precursor for future acts of athlete activism at the Olympic Games. They also showed how nationalism could be used as a political lever against colonial oppression in the context of sport.
Although Olympic officials were displeased with O’Connor’s act of political dissent, they did not expel him from the Games. He went on the win gold in the “hop, step, and jump” event, known today as the triple jump. When Leahy won a gold medal in the high jump he repeated his flag-waving protest, this time from the ground.158 In 1956 O’Connor remarked, “The British failed miserably in their efforts to annex any credit for the Irish successes and the flag incident received wide publicity in the world’s press and turned the spotlight very much on the Irish political situation at a period when very few dared to raise a protest against the British domination of our country.”159 Athletes were in the vanguard of political dissent.
There is disagreement among Olympic mavens over whether the 1906 intercalary Games qualify as an official Olympics. In the late 1940s, an IOC commission directed by future IOC president Avery Brundage decided that the 1906 Athens Games were not an actual Olympics, but a bevy of Olympic historians disagree. One scholar has gone as far as to say that those Games “may be the most important Olympic Games of the modern era—they saved the Olympic Movement.”160 After all, in the aftermath of St. Louis, the Games were reeling.
The striking success of US athletes in Athens—especially in track and field events where they were dominant—lent credence to the Americans’ “scientific” training regimen. They were a hit off the field too. Their fawning deference to and enthusiastic fraternizing with the Greek aristocracy ingratiated them with their hosts. After defeating O’Connor in the long jump under dubious circumstances, Prinstein wrote a letter to his fiancée describing a wild night of partying with the Greek king where they slugged down champagne, raided the royal cigar stash, attended “a millionaire’s villa and dance,” and behaved “like wild Indians.”161 Even the New York Times covered the “gala dinner” given by the king to commemorate “these never-to-be-forgotten days.”162
The 1906 Athens “intercalary” Olympics brought numerous innovations that remain with us today. As mentioned earlier, these Games had an opening ceremony with roughly 900 athletes parading behind twenty-two national flags. NOCs played a newfound role. During the Games, many athletes lived in the Zappeion, a de facto Olympic Village (although one the US team found unsatisfactory, moving quarters partway through the competition). And the Olympic organizing committee published for the first time ever an official list of participants and results, setting a trend for what became common practice as Official Reports at subsequent Olympic Games.163 Despite these strides, political instability in and around Greece made hosting another “intercalated” Olympics in Athens unviable. After the 1906 Games the region was wracked with conflict, and the Greek government, strapped by the costs and consequences of war, lacked resources.164 These and other factors made the four-year rotation of the Olympics the norm.
The Games Find Their Footing
When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 1906, forcing the 1908 Games to be relocated from Rome to London, Lord Desborough stepped in to help. An Olympic fencing medalist and IOC titan from Britain, Desborough announced that the Games “shall be carried out by private enterprise, and without help of any sort from the government, a distinction which other nations do not share.”165 This subtle allusion to disgruntlement in Rome, where locals had protested the high costs of hosting the Games, points to a lasting question in Olympic history: Who should pay the five-ring tab?166 Despite Desborough’s assurances, the Baron once again had to attach the Olympics to a World’s Fair, the Franco-British Exhibition, “for budgetary reasons.”167 But Lord Desborough’s support was part of a pivot, transforming the IOC from what was essentially a paper-tiger front group, to one that took a much bigger role in organizing the Olympic Games.168
The London Olympics would turn out to be a mixed success, but one thing about them is undeniable: they ran thick with monarchic entitlement. Bowing to the whims of privilege, the marathon began on the lawns of Windsor Castle, per the request of King Edward and Queen Alexandra,