16. Olympic Summer Games
Olympic Medals in the games of 1956 in Melbourne
469 Medals in 19 Sports in 151 Events
The 1956 Summer Olympics were not only the games in Melbourne, Australia, but also the Stockholm games. Unlike the Sydney Games in 2000, Australia had strict quarantine regulations for horses in 1956. The horses should have been in Australia half a year before the games. Of course that was absolutely not feasible! Therefore, the solution to the problem was chosen alternatively as the “Equestrian Games of the Games of the XVI. Olympiad ”in Stockholm. They were held from July 10th to 17th. The equestrian games received a lot of attention and were well attended because there were no other Olympic competitions at that time. The British royal family also belonged to the enthusiastic audience. Queen Elisabeth II and her sister Princess Margaret attended all competitions as expert spectators.
The Melbourne Summer Games were the first on the continent of Oceania, the first in the southern hemisphere, the first and only to be held almost in winter from November 22nd to December 8th. In Melbourne, spring almost passed into summer, even though Santa Claus waved from the shop windows in the department stores.
The all-German team consisted of athletes from the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and the Saarland. For the first time there were boycotts for political reasons. Less than three weeks before the start of the Summer Olympics, the states of the Waschau Pact, led by the Soviet Union, marched into Hungary and bloodily suppressed the popular uprising. Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland boycotted the games as a protest. Hungary marched in at the opening ceremony and received more applause than Australia's athletes. Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq stayed away from the competitions because of the Suez crisis. Two weeks before the games, the People's Republic of China announced that it would not participate in the games because the IOC had approved the Republic of Taiwan, which the Chinese considered to be their territory. The People's Republic of China, which was already an Olympic participant in 1952, only ended this boycott with the Winter Games in 1980.
Australia itself is a country that had begun colonization less than 170 years earlier. Unpleasant prisoners in particular were shipped from Great Britain to Australia. The history of antiquity came to Melbourne with the Olympic flag. The summer games were opened by Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's husband.
At the closing ceremony, athletes of all nations came to the Olympic Stadium as a symbol of global sporting ties, an innovation that is still practiced today. The organizer has managed to compensate for inexperience and organizational deficiencies through warm hospitality.