Swedish diver Erik Adlerz enjoyed a spectacular second appearance at the Olympic Games, winning two gold medals and making history in the process.

Alberto Braglia arrived in Stockholm as an Olympic champion, having won the individual all-around gymnastics event in London four years previously. He had been an outstanding gymnast since his youth – and had taught himself many of the required movements in his parents’ barn.

Jim Thorpe is now widely acknowledged as one of the most talented all-round athletes of the 20th century. His successes in Stockholm were clouded in controversy for many years, but they can now be enjoyed for the superb pieces of sporting achievement that they were.

No track athlete had a better record at the 1912 Games than the Finn Hannes Kolehmainen, who took home three gold medals and set the same number of Olympic records. He could claim to be the first great distance runner of the Olympic Games, winning the 5,000m, 10,000m and individual cross country events in thrilling fashion – while also taking a silver in the team cross country discipline, which was effectively decided by aggregating the results achieved by a country’s competitors in the individual race.

The Opening Ceremony took place on 6 July. The attendance was given as 13,653, and the crowd witnessed a superb spectacle. “Stockholm was in its most festive dress,” reads the Official Report. “The sun shone from a cloudless sky and lent its radiance to the thousand flags of the competing nations, as the colours, fraternally mingled, swayed and flaunted over the crowded streets.”

Until 2008, Henry Taylor was Great Britain’s most prolific gold medallist at an Olympic Games – his prowess in the pool setting a standard that would, astonishingly, not be bettered for an entire century.

Wyndham Halswelle could reasonably have expected to mount a strong challenge in London after finishing second in the Intercalated Games two years previously, but few could have foreseen the manner in which he won his only gold medal in front of his home crowd.

If Edgar Syers’ bronze medal at the age of 45 was a noteworthy achievement, marksman Oscar Swahn’s feat deserves superlatives of its own. The Swede had turned 60 by the time the running deer events came around in July 1908 – and his double victory proved to be just the start of an Olympic story that barely seems credible today.

Basketball

La chance a toujours tourné le dos à l’équipe de football de Yougoslavie dans les moments importants, mais à Rome, la roue de la fortune a tourné.