July 1948: Harringay Arena hosts Basketball for the Olympic Games

Whilst browsing the photo gallery a couple of weeks back, I was reminded that, in July 1948, the London Olympics came to Harringay when the Harringay Arena hosted the teams for the Basketball Competition.

When, this week, the daily email from Bruce Castle Museum featured the Olympics (from which I took the following information) written by curator Deborah Hedgecock, I took it as a gentle nudge to write a post for the HOL local history category to guide forum members to our small online gallery of photos and ephemera from the Olympic Basketball event at the Arena.

Background

1948 was the first time the Olympics had been organised since the 1936 Games, held in Berlin. The 12 year gap was because of World War II,  the 1940 Games were originally scheduled for Tokyo, and the 1944 Games provisionally planned for London. 

The 1948 Olympics event in London became known as the Austerity Games because of post-war rationing and the economic climate.

No new venues were built. Athletes were housed in existing accommodation instead of an Olympic Village. Alexandra Palace hosted 1,600 visitors, made up of 600 different people and 23 nationalities with the Racecourse Grandstand turned into a temporary Youth Hostel, organised by the North London Youth Hostel Association (YHA)

A record 59 nations were represented by 4,104 athletes, 3,714 men and 390 women, in 19 sport disciplines. Germany and Japan were not invited to participate because of their roles as aggressors in World War II. The (former) USSR were invited but chose not to send any athletes. The United States team won the most total medals, 84, and the most gold medals, 38. Britain won 23 medals, three of them gold.

Basketball comes to Harringay

The staging of the Olympic basketball events was held at Harringay Arena (seen in the photographs linked to above), which was one of the most important sporting venues in London.

Basketball at the 1948 Summer Olympics was the second appearance of the sport as an official medal event. A total number of 23 nations entered the competition.

Olympic basketball had returned to the Games to become an indoor competition, due to the disastrous weather conditions of the final basketball game in the 1936 Games in Berlin, when the outside court ended up being so muddy.

During 1948, Olympic pictograms were introduced for the first time. There were twenty of them in all, with one for each Olympic sport. They were called "Olympic symbols" and intended for the use on tickets.

For the basketball events, the designed outline of a basket and net featured on all entry tickets for the spectators at Harringay Arena. You can see the basket pictogram on the Olympic ticket pictured here on HOL 

Reports at the time indicated that the Iraqi basketball team caused high concern amongst the crowd at Harringay, as they did not play particularly well, losing two matches by over 100 points! But the highlight for many was watching a diminutive Chinese player in their basketball position as ‘point guard’, dribbling the ball right through the legs of the mammoth US team's centre player, Bob Kurland, who was 7 feet tall !

China and Iraq went on to finish 18th and 19th respectively in this event.

Resources

Click here to view our online gallery of the Basketball Event at Harringay Arena and, if that's whetted your appetite, you can also find the entire Basketball Competition Rules and Regulations plus information about the 1948 Olympic Committee and Schedule in the History Group here

Off site, Here is a list of all the players representing their countries and the results of the basketball events for the 1948 Games.

With grateful thanks to Deborah Hedgecock and the Bruce Castle Museum team for their local history emails and the information for this post. Find out how to sign up for emails here