1974 and all that: the friendliest games ever
Saturday, 20 January 2024
Fifty years ago, the eternal sunshine of the British Empire shone brightest on Christchurch. For two sun-drenched weeks, many of the world’s greatest athletes made a small city in the South Island of New Zealand feel like the centre of the universe. Even before the closing ceremony, the 1974 Commonwealth Games were being fondly remembered and in the ensuing decades the feeling has only grown. How did this Anglo-centric anachronism win a place in our hearts? MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “flashbulb moment”. Usually, it applies to certain terrible news events, vividly recalled: Kennedy shot, the Erebus disaster, 9/11. People don’t just remember these things, but associate them with whatever it was they were doing when they learned of them. Asked (or not) to recall them, they will tell you the story.
If you’re a New Zealander of a certain age, then one of your flashbulb moments is almost certainly Dick Tayler winning the 10,000m at the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch in 1974. Tayler’s gold - on the first day of competition - captured an affection that has never really gone away. For decades, if you needed to invoke the good old days - when the sun shined longer and people were happier and things were simpler and everything was just BETTER - then the time the Commonwealth Games were in Christchurch was what you reached for.
Why? We hosted, of course. And we did well (nine gold medals), but not astronomically so, and not nearly as well as in Auckland in 1990 (17 golds). Yet somehow, the 1974 games have endured. Embedded in our cultural consciousness. The most halcyon of all our halcyon days. Their abiding popularity even moved current Christchurch mayor Phil Mauger to last year suggest, ill-advisedly, hosting them again.
If you’re old enough, the memories are thick: Tayler getting the job done, Treffers and Parkhouse in the pool, Robin Tait, Graham May, the snazzy logo, the theme song, the royals, those Kingswoods that everybody got around in. But reciting the memories we remember fondly is not an explanation for why we remember them fondly. How did all these things coalesce just so in our collective brain?
There’s a bunch of reasons. Most of them down to chance. Starting with Christchurch not hosting the Commonwealth Games. The city tried for them in 1950 - it was thought they would be a suitale cap to centenary celebrations that year - but they were awarded to Auckland instead. “I am very disappointed and very shocked that Auckland should be so selfish in such circumstances,” Mayor Ernest Andrews told The Press at the time. “It is very bad news, indeed.” He was probably right, but can you name a single thing about the 1950 British Empire Games? By comparison, they are lost to history.
Christchurch tried again in 1970 but missed out to Edinburgh. “[It] was fortunate from our point of view,” said Bruce Ullrich, the deputy chair of the 1974 organising committee. “It was a very good model for following.” The opening ceremony was particularly instructive. Ullrich had somehow landed the job of artistic director for Christchurch as well, so paid close attention. “[In Edinburgh] there was spectacular massed bands, dancers, bagpipers…the ingredients were colour, spectacle and emotion. And we had to try and capture that in a New Zealand environment.”
Christchurch’s version was a hit. Watch it online now and it seems impossibly quaint: the brass band, a Maori cultural performance, thousands of school kids running onto QEII Stadium to form a giant games emblem. Two days before, the dress rehearsal had been a disaster, Ullrich said, but on the day everything fell into place. It was simple, happy and easy to love. A world away from the multi-million-dollar extravaganzas of today. “You know how much it cost?” Ullrich said. “$24,000.”
Ullrich had a hand in another decisive move. Perhaps the single biggest reason why the games are so vivid in people’s memories - colour television. Colour TV was introduced in New Zealand in late 1973 but it was supposed to take a year for the whole country to get it. Ullrich lobbied the Government to fast track the rollout. As a result, all of the track and field and swimming coverage was in colour. The first non-black and white sporting event on New Zealand television - probably the first colour broadcast many Kiwis remember - was Dick Tayler’s gold medal. “It was a novelty,” Ullrich said. “People were standing outside electrical shops that had colour televisions looking at the games.”
Tayler himself is the first to acknowledge this. “I’ve been going on about it for 50 years,” he said, and he really has. Tayler parlayed the 1974 Commonwealth Games into a career. For decades, he has been a sought-after public speaker and MC, telling the apocryphal story of how he won a gold medal. In the ‘90s he fell in with Colin Meads and they made a formidable duo on the after-dinner circuit. Pinetree was Pinetree - a demigod. Tayler was the everyman made good, recounting how his coach, the great Arthur Lydiard, took him to the Bush Inn pub in Riccarton for a beer the night before the race and inspired him.
“He never, ever said I was going to win,” Tayler said. “He always said I'll run my best time…He wrote down the lap times and how I'd do that. It was uncanny. No pressure about winning. But I knew if I ran that time I was going to get a New Zealand record, a Commonwealth Games record, and maybe not far away from the world record.”
So practised a raconteur is he, Tayler, now 75, tells this well-worn story unprompted, and continues it into race day, a part fewer people have heard. Just before the race, in the warm-up area outside the stadium, Tayler could see his coach talking to a taller man wearing a hat and sunglasses. “When they called all mens 10,000m [competitors] to the track, they all left and Arthur told me, ‘Don't go, Richard, you just stay here’. This guy was talking to Lydiard and I thought, ‘Who the hell's he?’ I'd never seen him before. He walked up to me and took his cap off and the dark glasses - it was Peter Snell. Here was the greatest athlete we've ever had and he comes and talks to you before you step on the track.”
“[Snell] said, ‘Richard, you're running very well at the moment. What time did you run for the mile five days ago?’ I said, ‘4 minutes and 3 seconds’. [He said,] ‘Were you happy with that?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘Lydiard told you the wrong thing. You went 3.57. Which is your fastest mile.’ And hearing that I thought, ‘Jesus’. When I stepped out on the track and looked around there was no-one else in this field running 3.57…the gun went and I did my thing.”
Lydiard had told Tayler he’d run 27.45 that day. “He was wrong,” Tayler said. “I ran 27.46.4.”
Part of the appeal of Tayler’s win was the field he beat. The Englishman David Bedford, who had broken the world record the year before, was the heavy favourite. In fact, there was quality across the entire track meet. In 1974, Commonwealth Games competition was still as good as any. Olympic medallists Don Quarrie and Raelene Boyle reigned supreme in the sprints, but perhaps most impressive was the clash between middle-distance titans John Walker and Filbert Bayi in the 1500m. Bayi pipped Walker but both men broke the previous world record.
Two years later, Walker trounced a Bayi-less field to win gold in the 1500m at the Montreal Olympics. Bayi’s Tanzania had joined other African nations in boycotting the games in protest at the All Blacks touring South Africa that year. This timing was another thing in Christchurch’s favour. In 1974, New Zealand’s sporting contact with apartheid South Africa was still only at misdemeanour level. The 1970 All Blacks tour had been blighted by the ‘honorary whites’ status granted to Māori and Pasifika players like Sid Going and Bryan Williams, but in 1973 Prime Minister Norman Kirk cancelled the return visit by the Springboks, saying he would be “failing in his duty if he didn’t…do what [he] believed to be right”. Kirk’s call was controversial but kept New Zealand on the right side of history for a couple more years. The nadir of 1981 was still ahead of us.
That innocence, or naivete, extended to the idea of the Commonwealth Games themselves. In 1974, public sentiment was years away from wondering if the games were an anachronism or a second-rate event. This was a time when Britain still had actual colonies. The Duke of Edinburgh opened the games and was later joined in Christchurch by Prince Charles, Princess Anne and the Queen. Their every move was catalogued. “The Games are the thing,” The Press observed, “And the Royal visit confirms this.”
For further confirmation, head to Te Papa, where one of the games hostess uniforms is on display. Hostesses carried the medals for medal ceremonies, not usually a role that commands attention. But in 1974, their crisp uniforms, adaptable with cape and hat, became one of the most enduring sights of the games. “Each time there was a victory ceremony, the uniforms of the victory hostesses brought audible comments of praise from spectators,” Apparel magazine wrote shortly afterwards. “There were people wanting to buy the uniforms off the girls' backs - one was an English competitor.”
“It had to be something that was very sleek,” said Jane Daniels, who designed the outfits. “It looked like a uniform.” Daniels, now one of New Zealand’s best-known designers, was just 20 when she submitted her entry to a competition to design the hostess uniform. “If you look at ‘70s fashion for women it was highly impractical things like bell bottom trousers in huge platform heels,” she said. “I was looking to make this as practical as I could. As distinctive as I could…It was very concise. I think it always sort of stood out at a venue. The girls were always in packs and all dressed the same. I think colour TV had a bit to do with it, too. A lot of people bought their televisions so they could see the Commonwealth Games. That was why my uniforms had a big impact.”
The uniforms also incorporated the one games image that might have been even more enduring - the logo. Designed by Colin Simon, the four bisected Ns and Zs in contrasting blue and red were everywhere - officially and unofficially. After the games, the symbol was adopted by the New Zealand Shipping Corporation, but it achieved near-mythic status elsewhere. If New Zealand Nostalgia Inc had a logo - it would be the 1974 Commonwealth Games symbol. Ren Cameron, who is organising 50th anniversary commemorations in Christchurch next weekend, came across all sorts of fashion crimes while sourcing memorabilia. “There’s ashtrays, berets, undies,” he said. “It’s crazy. I don’t think they had any control on merchandise.”
In 1974, no-one could have predicted the games logo would have a second life as one of the crown jewels of Kiwiana. Genuine affinity must be organic, otherwise it isn’t genuine. In this sense, Christchurch perfectly crested the wave: the right event in the right place at the right time. The weather, the medals, the iconography, colour TV. A multicultural festival in monocultural Christchurch. It was late enough for the mass media era but early enough to miss the worst of 1970s geopolitics like oil shocks, Gleneagles violations and pesky questions about colonialism.
The Commonwealth Games were known as the “friendly games” before Christchurch, but the city claimed the moniker for itself. There were no objections. “Already the phrase ‘the friendly Games’ has become hackneyed; but, like many a hackneyed phrase, it expresses a truth,” wrote The Press in its post-Games editorial on February 4, 1974. “If Christchurch is remembered by its visitors - humble or Royal, competitors or spectators - as the scene of ‘the friendly Games’ that should be sufficient reward for those who worked for their success, and for all the Christchurch residents whose welcome helped to make these ‘the friendly Games’.”
Dick Tayler knew it almost straight away. The day after his win he went to the airport with Lydiard. “It was then I realised,” he said. “People going crazy…coming up and hugging me, [taking] photographs. I thought, ‘What the hell have I done?’ I didn't realise how much impact it would have.”
His success earned him an audience with the Queen aboard the royal yacht Brittania. Tayler, already the embodiment of the friendly games, somehow doubled down. The son of a potato farmer from Winchester, South Canterbury, found a way to make the 1974 Commonwealth Games even more endearing. “I was that nervous about meeting her,” he said. “They said her hand may not come out, so you may not have to shake her hand. But if you do, just gently shake it. Don't squeeze the shit out of it. And it's, ‘Your Majesty’ and ‘Ma'am’, Your Majesty and Ma'am. And I practised that. Your Majesty and Ma'am.”
“When the moment came…I called her Mrs Queen.”