Remembering Sacrifice: A Sports Perspective

For Britain, the war did claim sporting greats and other significant personalities: British rugby alone lost 80 internationals, including captains of England and Scotland, Ronnie Poulton-Palmer and Fred Turner; 34 of 210 first-class test cricketers never returned; while football's dead contained players like Walter Tull, Britain's first Afro-Caribbean infantry officer, FA Cup winners Jimmy Spiers, Bob Torrance, and Sandy Turnbull, and Olympic gold medallists Tom Burn and Joe Dines.

Enough British Olympians died to create a seemingly endless roll of honour. They ranged from professional soldier and promising double bronze medallist runner George Hutson, killed during the Battle of the Marne, to Oxford rowers Duncan Mackinnon and John Somers-Smith, who won gold in 1908's coxless fours event and died during the battles of the Somme and Paschendaele.

All countries experienced similar loss of athletes, many of whom had also competed in the Olympics, among them, Germany's Hanns Braun (Silver, running), Willy Lützow (silver, swimming); Hungary's Béla von Las-Torres (silver, swimming); footballers Karl Braunsteiner, Robert Merz, Andrei Akimov, Nikolai Kynin, Grigory Nikitin, André François, René Fenouillière, Piere Six, Justin Vialaret, Hermann Bosch, Otto Thiel; New Zealand's Wimbledon champion Tony Wilding (bronze); and Australia's Cecil Healy (gold, silver), an early swimming icon who was killed shortly after his arrival on the Western Front, on 29 August 1918.

For France, the war had a profound, enduring legacy that left a vast swathe of the country scarred. The devastation wrought at the Battle of Verdun and elsewhere would culminate in an exhausted and demoralised French Army experiencing a series of temporary "mutinies" in 1917.

Among the hundreds of thousands of casualties incurred within the first month of the war were silver medallist Jean Bouin, one of France's earliest long-distance runners, bronze medallist shooter Henri Bonnefoy, and rugby internationals Emmanuel Iguiniz, Gaston Lane, and Alfred Maysonnié.

More inevitably followed, including Grand Prix motor driver Georges Boillot, cyclists Octave Lapize and François Faber, and a further 21 rugby internationals.

Today, these athletes and the millions of other casualties are still remembered as a lost generation—consumed most poignantly by the quagmire of Flanders, disfigured by the destructive implements of war where poppies flourish as they did before.

The Second World War

In a conflict driven and defined by racist ideology and extreme nationalist dogma, it was not only those athletes in uniform who suffered. A significant proportion became victims of systematic persecution by regimes which killed because of disability, ethnicity, politics, religion, sexuality, and resistance.

Some athletes born in Germany and its allied countries opposed the governing regimes, two such being Werner Seelenbinder and Paolo Salvi.

Seelenbinder was a Communist German wrestler and avowed opponent of the Nazis who received a 16-month ban in 1933 for refusing to give the Hitler salute and was only allowed to compete in the 1936 Olympics because the authorities believed he would medal.

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