Housing athletes has always been an Olympian challenge
RIO has come under fire for the quality of the athletes’ accommodation but it still better than army barracks or tents at past Olympics.
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IF 10,000 guests are staying over a good host would ensure that the accommodation is up to scratch. But with reports this week that some rooms in Rio’s Olympic village are dirty, have leaky plumbing, exposed wiring and even dark stairwells, the housing created for our finest athletes won’t win any gold medals.
However the Rio organisers can perhaps take heart that their Olympic village is still better than the tents or converted military barracks that served in the past as athlete’s accommodation.
At the ancient Olympics in Olympia there was no purpose-built athlete housing. Most competitors found their own accommodation, pitching tents near the stadium along with other athletes and spectators who came to see the Games. While some city states subsidised their athletes for food and housing, most athletes paid their own way.
When Lucius Cornelius Sulla moved the Games to Rome in 80BC, the ancient city increased accommodation options. By then many athletes were professional sportspeople so they would have had their own money to book a room at one of the many Roman inns.
The first few Games of the modern Olympics made no concession to athlete accommodation. At the first Games, in 1896 in Athens, Australian Edwin Flack rented a house with two English friends. When the Games returned to Athens in 1906 the Zappeion, which used as a fencing venue in 1896, became a makeshift dwelling for some athletes.
In 1923 the IOC determined host nations had to make sure that there were places for athletes to live and to provide them with food at a fixed price.
The first “Village Olympique” — a row of primitive wooden cabins near the Olympic venues — was created at the Paris Games in 1924. For the 1928 Amsterdam Games a shortage of space for building a village close enough to the venues led to the creative solution of boarding athletes on ships in Amsterdam harbour.
Los Angeles in 1932 had no shortage of space, but the depression meant that money was tight.
Organisers were able to charge athletes only $2 a day for food and lodging by creating a town in the Baldwin Hills, with easily assembled and dismantled houses, which were sold off at the end of the Games. The village only housed men, women were put up at the swish Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.
The Nazis also built a small town for athletes at Wustermark, west of Berlin, for the 1936 Games. The village featured state-of-the-art amenities and training facilities. It was so well built that it served as a military school after the games, and a Russian military barracks after the war. It has been abandoned since 1992. London was still in the grip of rationing when it hosted the 1948 Games. The Olympics had to be held on a shoestring budget so the practical English used an RAF base at Uxbridge and a former Army convalescent camp for the athlete’s village.
For the 1952 Games Helsinki already had a village they had built for the cancelled 1940 Olympics (which had originally been awarded to Tokyo but Japan forfeited on the outbreak of war in China). However, the Games had grown since then so other villages had to be built and a military base converted to hold the overflow.
When Melbourne’s organisers realised they would have a housing shortage they asked both the premier of Victoria and the prime minister for funds, only to be knocked back by both. It nearly lost them the Games but a federal loan came to the rescue to create an Olympic Village in Heidelberg West that became public housing after the games.
In 1960 Rome built an impressive village that also went on to be used as public housing.
Tokyo had to build five villages, including an extra one for yachting crews whose events were miles away from Tokyo.
Mexico built a complex of 29 towers for the 1968 Games that still stands as a model of public housing.
At Munich the open and friendly nature of its apartment complex Olympic Village in 1972 took a terrible turn when Palestinian terrorists took members of Israel’s team hostage, killing 11. It led to greater security at the Montreal Games Olympic Villages in 1976, with its distinctive pyramid shape, and at all Games thereafter.
Most organisers have tried to make sure the villages become useful after the Games are over, including Sydney where the village became the suburb of Newington and in Atlanta, which still uses its buildings for student accommodation.
Originally published as Housing athletes has always been an Olympian challenge
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