After the Olympics were cancelled in both 1940 and 1944 due to war on an international scale, the event was reinstated by the International Olympics Committee in 1948 with London serving as the host city. Olympic Cavalcade is a documentary record of the Games which turned out to be a good year for the United States; they reclaimed their place at the top of the overall medal standings. However, the 1948 event is mostly significant for two individual winners - Fanny Blankers-Koen and Bob Mathias. The former was a 30-year-old Dutch mother of two who duplicated Jesse Owens' track and field record of 12 years before by winning the 100-meter and 200-meter runs, the 80-meter hurdles, and anchoring the women's 4x100-meter relay. Mathias, on the other hand, was a seventeen-year-old boy from California who had just graduated from Tulare High School and won the gold medal in the decathlon event. The prize-winning athlete would later play himself in the Hollywood biopic, The Bob Mathias Story (1954), with able support from co-stars Ward Bond and Ann Doran.
Director: Joseph Lerner
BW-60m.
by Jeff Stafford
