Chapter 9: The Intercalated Games, Athens 1906

The intercalated games of 1906 represented an attempt by the Greeks to reassert some influence over the Olympic movement by instituting a series of games fixed in Athens intercalated between the peripatetic series. The British participated though the British Olympic Association (BOA) was forced to use its networks to raise money from charitable organisations to pay the expenses of athletes. We follow the voyage of the British fencer Theodore Andrea Cook, who travelled with Desborough and others from Naples to Athens on the Steam Yacht Branwen. The event would be diplomatically important because the British used it to wrest for London the hosting rights for 1908 from Rome. We discuss the diplomatic process that facilitated this as well as the broader success of these games, which despite their intercalated nature demonstrated the established nature of the Olympic movement by this time.