Charles Holland (cyclist) - Olympic Games: Berlin 1936

Olympic Games: Berlin 1936

Holland rode the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, selected for the 100 km road race and as reserve for the 4,000m team pursuit. Cycling was unimpressed by the team: "If these are our best men then they are unlikely to bring back any Olympic titles from Germany."

Holland did not win a medal but he believed it would have been different had his younger brothers, Alf and Jack, been chosen to ride with him. Alf was a reserve; Jack was the 25-mile national champion.

The 1936 Games were the so-called Hitler Olympics. Unlike most other Olympic Games to date, where the political aspects were subtle and nuanced, the Berlin Games were explicitly politicised.

The road race on the morning of August 8 began at the Avus car course, a circuit laid out on public roads to test cars. It then used a straight dual-carriageway through Berlin, a little over 12 miles long. From there the course crossed the narrow roads of the Forest of Grunewald before returning to the car track to finish. It was the first Olympic road race to be run with all the competitors starting together, rather than individually and at intervals against the watch. Sixty riders led at 81 km and fewer than 30 at 91 km, not because of hills or the speed - which was low - but because of narrow roads, punctures and crashes. Holland reached the finish and started the sprint for the finish 100m from the line. He finished less than a second behind the winner, Robert Charpentier of France, but outside the first three.

Guy Lapébie of France came second - discovering months later from the film of the finish that Charpentier had grabbed his jersey and tugged him back - and then Ernst Nievergelt from Switzerland. Holland finished fifth. His club magazine reported:

It must have been a nightmare kind of event and one in which only the strongest combinations could have kept a rider in the front bunch. Charlie could not gather his compatriots round him and from what we can understand he had to fight his way, elbowing, jostling and pushing to occupy a front position in that fierce affair. Very many riders came to grief, a happening that overtook most of the other British representatives; but Charles sailed through barging and bucking into the excited crowd and actually leading the field a few hundred yards from the finishing tape.

From a story recounted in the magazine of the Fellowship of Cycling Old-Timers:

During one of our long conversations while Phil, his lovely wife, prepared tea, Charlie (she always called him Charles) recalled an incident while training for the Berlin Olympics. He was out in the countryside and stopped for a rest, to look around, on a bridge that passed over a newly constructed autobahn. Below him in the distance he could see a mass of vehicles coming down the new super highway, constructed of concrete, with the swastika flags fluttering from the wings of the massive Mercedes as they convoyed towards the stadium. Seated in one of the open Mercs was the well-known figure of one Adolf Hitler. As Charlie said, he could have prevented world war two by simply dropping a bomb in Hitler's lap.

Holland regarded 1936 as the peak of his career. As well as the Olympics, he travelled to the Isle of Man to win the first massed-start road-race over the island's 37-mile Snaefell mountain course, on 18 June 1936. In a sprint finish to what was effectively the first Manx International road race, Holland beat Bill Messer (Marlboro AC) by a length with the Scot Jackie Bone third, the lap covered in 1 hour 42 minutes and 59 seconds, a speed of 22 mph.