Sweden and the Games - final

Swedish competitors were remarkably successful, but none more so than those in the ‘Running Deer Shooting, Double Shot’ event in which they took the first eight places! They also won the Team Single Shot event. In all, they took 7 gold, 6 silver and 4 bronze in the 18 shooting events and 4 out of the 5 equestrian gold. They won all three medals in the triple jump, also had seven out of the eight finalists in the Women’s Platform Diving. The Modern Pentathlon was also a great Swedish success, with Swedes in the first four places, plus sixth and seventh.

In track and field athletics, however, US athletes were dominant. They were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th in the 100m after seven (!) false starts in the final, the first three by the gold medal winner, Ralph Craig. Craig also took gold in the 200m, with Lippincott second. The US took the first four places in the 110m hurdles and the 800m, when all four runners broke the previous world record. In the pole vault, the US was 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th equal. They were also 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th in the shot put.

The 1500m was won by Arnold Jackson from Britain, with the photo finish camera used to determine second and third places. The man adjudged to come second, Abel Kiviat of the US took part in the torch relay in 1984 at the age of 91, carrying it for 1 km in NY City.

The Greco Roman wrestling bout between Russia’s Martin Klein and Alfred Asikainen from Finland went on for more than 11 hours before Klein won. But both men were too exhausted to fight Swede Claes Johansson in the final and he was declared the middleweight champion, with Klein second and Asikainen third. The light-heavyweight final between the Swedish hope Anders Ahlgren and Finn Ivar Böhling was abandoned after nine hours. Both were declared to have lost (!) with no gold awarded. They were given silver medals instead.

The Games were officially ended on 27th July with a banquet at which Coubertin made a hopeful speech about the future. But the First World War broke out two years later and the 1916 Games that were supposed to be in Berlin, were never held. Many of the competitors who took part in Stockholm were killed in the war, while Otto Herschmann, a member of the Austrian silver-medal sabre team and previously a bronze medal winner in 1896 in the 100m freestyle swimming, died in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland in June 1942. He was President of the Austrian Olympic Committee in 1912, making him the only sitting national OC President to win an Olympic medal.