“Once every four years the world goes to war. They call it the games.” – Advertisement for the 1970 Michael Winner film, The Games, starring Stanley Baker and Ryan O’Neal.
The Games was my introduction to the Olympics. The movie centres around four long distance runners from Czechoslovakia, the US, England and Australia who are preparing to contest the gruelling 26-mile Olympic marathon in Rome, and it demonstrated an exacting statement of how improbable it is to convert one’s dedicated