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Did you know?
- The first ceremony for the lighting of the Olympic flame in Olympia took place in 1936. For the first time, the Olympic flame was lit in an Olympic Stadium in 1928 and that practice was repeated in 1932. The lighting ceremony that is accompanied by a torch relay, is an invocation to Zeus and Apollo, two powerful gods in the pantheon of the ancient Greek religion. During the ceremony the chief priestess recites the following words: "Apollo, god of the sun and enlightenment,/ send your rays and light the sacred torch./ And you, Zeus, grant peace to all peoples of the world/ and crown the victorious in these sacred games".
- The French team did not participate in the opening ceremony. The cause of that was an incident that had occurred between French athletes and the guard of the stadium, who refused entrance to them, since he did not recognize that they were members of the French delegation. Despite the public apology of the organizing committee and its commitment to dismiss the employee, such thing never happened. Therefore the heads of the French team decided to protest by being absent at the opening ceremony and naturally at the parade of athletes.
- The licence for the photographing of the Games was granted to only one agency. Therefore, the opening and closing ceremonies, the parade and the oath of the athletes, the lighting of the Olympic flame and naturally the shots of the Games had constituted for the first time the object of commercial exploitation from the part of the organizers. That had aroused protestations and minor incidents in the tiers, as the policemen were trying to extract the films from the cameras that many spectators, either amateurs or professionals, carried with them.
- The winner of the marathon was the Algerian El Quafi, who was competing with the French team. Seventy-four athletes on the whole took part in the marathon and the course followed was along the river Amstel, the start and finish line being inside the stadium. During the race the spectators that were inside the stadium had the opportunity to follow its progress, since announcements were often made from the speakers.
- For the first time in the Olympic Games of 1928, Asian athletes won gold medals. Mikio Oda from Japan won the triple jump, while another Japanese athlete won the 200m breaststroke setting a new Olympic record. That was Yoshiyuki Tsuruta, who could be considered the precursor of the great Japanese school of swimming that made its appearance in the following Olympic organization in 1932 in Los Angeles. Lastly, in 1928 India won its first gold medal in a team sport, field hockey.
- Field hockey was held in May, almost two months earlier than the other sports of the Olympic Games of 1928. In the final that took place on 26 May the team of India beat the Dutch team with a score 3-0 in front of 24,000 spectators, Dutch in the overwhelming majority, which was the largest attendance ever in a hockey game in the history of the Olympics.
- Hockey was not included in the 1924 Paris Games, because the International Federation of that sport had not been founded yet. From the Olympic Games of 1920 and onwards the IOC had limited the power of the organizers to determine the programme, because in the previous organizations that had resulted in the inclusion or exclusion of events without any uniform rationale. Since 1920 this responsibility has devolved on the IOC and since the Games of 1924 only the sports that had been organized into international federations, among other things, were included in the Games. Before the Games of 1924 it was those federations that laid down the rules for each sport. Although hockey was organized into a federation in 1924 in Paris, short before the Games, it was judged that it was late for readapting the programme. Therefore, field hockey was permanently reintroduced in the Olympic Games in 1928.
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