Poland’s Stanislawa Walasiewicz (pictured above) ran a world record-equalling time of 11.9 seconds to win the women’s 100m gold medal at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Her parents had emigrated to the United States when she was an infant but, unable to gain US citizenship, she ran for her country of birth. Known in the US as Stella Walsh, she set more than 100 national and world records. In 1980, by now long since a US citizen, Walsh was shot dead when, as an innocent bystander, she was caught in the crossfire of an attempted robbery in a Cleveland shopping mall. An autopsy revealed that “she” had male genitals and both male and female chromosomes. All the while that Walsh had been winning medals and setting records, she was in fact “Stella the Fella”.

Although Chariots of Fire, the Academy Award-winning film of 1981, was based on the true story of two British sprinters, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, competing in the Paris Olympics of 1924, there are a plethora of historical inaccuracies in the film. Chief among them pertains to Liddell’s refusal to race on a Sunday. For he knew months in advance - as opposed to when he was boarding the boat to travel to Paris - that his 100m heats would take place on a Sunday and had therefore already switched to the 400m, an event in which he would win the gold medal. There was, therefore, no meeting between Liddell and the Prince of Wales, as was depicted in the film. Lord Lindsay (actually Lord Burghley) did not win a medal in the 110m hurdles, though he did win the 400m hurdles in Amsterdam four years later. And Abrahams did not run around the perimeter of the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge in the time that it took the clock to strike 12 noon. (Lord Burghley, for his part, achieved the feat in 1927.) And nor did Liddell and Abrahams compete against each other in the 1923 AAA’s championship, although they raced against each other in the 1924 Olympic 200m final, when Liddell came third and Abrahams sixth.

John Pius Boland was an Irish-born Oxford University student who won two tennis gold medals in Athens in 1896, despite having travelled to the first modern Olympics with the sole intention of being a spectator. However, at the behest of Thrasyvoalos Manoas, whom he had invited to address the Oxford Union on the revival of the Olympic Games and who was a member of the organising committee in Athens, Boland competed in the men’s singles and men’s doubles tennis events, winning both. He beat Dionysios Kasdaglis, a Greek-Egyptian from Alexandria, to lift the singles title and teamed up with Fritz Traun, a German who had competed in the 800m, to win the doubles final, against Kasdaglis and Demetrios Petrokokkinos. Boland later became a distinguished barrister and a Member of Parliament. Although he lived the majority of his life in England, he remained fiercely proud of his Irish nationality and was a passionate supporter of both the Irish language and Irish independence.

Live pigeons were used as moving targets in a shooting competition at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, making it the only occasion that the killing of animals has been part of an Olympic event. In all, about 300 pigeons are thought to have perished, with Belgian Leon de Lunden bagging no less than 21 of them in the final shoot-off to win the Live Pigeon Shooting gold medal. In a Games that were notable for their chaos, Donald Macintosh, an Australian, won the bronze medal with 18 kills, although he was under the impression that he was competing in a day of live pigeon shooting for the World‘s Fair, which was taking place simultaneously. Spectators often had little idea that they were watching Olympic events while athletes, too, were uncertain whether they were participating in Olympic competitions. The track and field events were held in July on an uneven, grassy field in the Parisian suburb of Bois de Boulogne, (where the athletics hurdles were made out of broken telephone poles) while the swimming events took place in a pool on the River Seine in August. It was no wonder that Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founding father of the modern Olympics (and a Frenchman himself), later remarked: “It is a miracle the Olympic movement survived these games.”

Rope climbing was an Olympic event on four occasions - in 1896, 1904, 1924 and 1932 - before it was discontinued. The rope, which was 14 metres high at the 1896 Games in Athens, was suspended from a frame and the height achieved, and the time it took to get there, were taken into account when ascertaining the placings of those competitors who did not reach the top. There were five entrants in 1896, though only two Greeks, Nikolaos Andriakopolous, who finished first, and Thomas Xenakis, the silver medallist, completed the climb. Launceston Elliott, the sole British participant, finished fifth and last, although he did win the One-Arm Lift event in the weightlifting competition to become Britain‘s first Olympic champion.