Harry Gordon - cont/

GOLD! An Olympic Celebration

Extracts from Harry Gordon's latest book

John Ian Wing did not attend the closing day, or any other day, of the Melbourne Olympics. (see footnote) he couldn’t afford a ticket – and he watched the opening ceremony, and some track-and-field and swimming events, on black-and white television in a department store window. (TV was new to Melbourne in 1956: the total number of sets in a city whose population was 1.6 million was 5000).

On the final day, a Saturday, he went to the movies and watched a western whose name he’s forgotten. When he came out in the late afternoon, he joined a small crowd outside a shop window watching the close of the Games. He wasn’t sure whether the Olympic boss had taken any notice of his letter.

“They (the athletes) all seemed to be doing what i wanted them to do,” he explained later. “But I wasn’t sure whether it was because of my letter, or whether the organisers had planned it that way anyway. This was on the Saturday, and there were no Sunday newspapers then in Melbourne. Then on the Monday it was in all the newspapers about what a success this anonymous idea had been. One of them called it the idea of the century.

The press wanted me to come forward. I overheard people talking about it at work, but i decided not to say anything. I was just too embarrassed. I didn’t even tell my father. I was frightened he might be upset.”

The official report of the Melbourne Games called the closing ceremony “a prophetic image of a new future for mankind”, and “a fiesta of friendship”, offering “scarce-imagined possibilities for the race of man.”

The Prime Minister (and president of the Games) Robert Menzies wrote in his foreword: “On the first day (the athletes) had all marched as competitors in their national teams, preserving their national identity, headed by their national flags. On the last day they went around the arena as men and women who had learned to be friends, who had broken down some of the barriers of language, of strangeness, of private prejudices. And because of this, the last day became a remarkable international demonstration, carrying with it a significance which was not overlooked by anybody who was lucky enough to be present.” (see footnote 1)

The report’s chapter of the closing ceremony made it clear that the mixed parade, which it described as “unexpected”, had been the result of a very late decision. It mentioned that two or three days before the ceremony, “a suggestion” had been made; that it was not until mid-day on the day before the closing ceremony that organisers were instructed about the prospect of a different kind of parade; that on the last night a meeting was called of chefs de mission, some of whom were unable to attend; and that there was no opportunity to “arrange precise procedure” for the ceremony.......

......Wing did finally write a second letter to Kent Hughes about a week after the Games, giving his identify and address. Soon afterwards, an official car pulled up outside his father’s restaurant, and the driver brought in a bronze commemorative medallion. When Wing came downstairs and told him his name, the driver handed it over with the words; “Mr Kent Hughes wants you to have this.” Kent Hughes later wrote to Wing, but he never saw the letter. “My father, not knowing what it was all about, probably just threw it away.” He says now.

Soon after the Games the episode seemed to disappear from public consciousness, and Wing left Australia in the late 1960s. Nothing more was heard of him until I wrote an essay in Time Australia magazine in 1986, headed, “Where Are You, John Ian Wing?” Such is the power of the media that he quickly surfaced in England, and returned to Melbourne as a guest of honour at the opening of the Melbourne Cricket Club’s Australian Gallery of Sport and Olympic Museum.

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