Hurrah for history

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  Frank Keating

  Hurrah for history

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

I crib from a startlingly good, timely and vividly illuminating new book by the author and always exemplary researcher Anton Rippon (Hitler’s Olympics, Pen and Sword Books, £19.99). For historians, the overpowering aura of this Berlin colosseum, conceived and erected a lifetime ago to the glory of imperial dominance, will somehow be magnified, well, 70 times over when the 2006 football finalists kick off tomorrow night. The new Germans see a World Cup final in Hitler’s Olympiastadion as a symbol of the new Germany. ‘We need no more to airbrush away our past history,’ Markus Hesselmann, sports editor of Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel told the Guardian the other day. ‘We learn from it, take responsibility for it, and now we move on.’

Let us look tomorrow to a final of skill and chivalry and good temper. On the field, the 2006 tournament has been unedifyingly stained by the feigning of injury and the appalling ‘Hollywood’ palaver which accompanies such antics. A ten-minute ‘sin bin’ would soon put a stop to it. Mind you, things were not much better even under Hitler’s mad martinet’s gaze. When Italy played the United States on this same Reich sportsfield 70 summers ago, the German ref Herr Weingartner sent off Italian star Piccini — retracting in no time and allowing him to stay (and Italy to win 1–0) when ‘several Italian players pinned Weingartner’s arms to his sides and covered his mouth with their hands’. And when Austria met Peru five days later, a pitch invasion saw the match abandoned (at 4–2 to Peru) and a replay ordered with no spectators present — at which the entire Peruvian Olympic contingent packed their suitcases and hotfooted it home (closely followed, in continental solidarity, by the Colombian team) in high dudgeon to Lima, where they stoned the German consulate. Hurrah, at least, for history.