According to legends, in ancient Greece, all wars were stopped during the Olympic Games, and opponents competed only on sports grounds. The Olympic movement was revived in the last years of the nineteenth century, but it failed to change the new priorities of modern civilization. Wars are now more important than the Olympics, and the number VI in the annals of the Summer Games serves as a constant reminder of this - this is the ordinal number of the Olympics, which did not exist.
Berlin received the right to host the summer sports forum in 1916 at the 14th session of the International Olympic Committee, which took place in 1912 in the Swedish capital - Stockholm. In addition to him, Greek Alexandria, American Cleveland, Austro-Hungarian Budapest and two more European capitals - Dutch Amsterdam and Belgian Brussels - claimed the VI Summer Olympics.
In the same year, Berlin began preparations for the future Olympics, and the next summer the grand opening of the main stadium of the summer games - the 18,000th Deutsches Stadion - took place. However, a year later, in Sarajevo, the Bosnian terrorist Gavrila Princip shot and killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thus initiated the process that led to the collapse of not only the Berlin Olympics, but also the four empires. During 1914 and 1915, 33 countries from different continents were drawn into the war as allies or opponents of Germany.
However, in 1914 no one expected that hostilities in civilized Europe of the 20th century would last for years. Even after the declaration of war on the three states, the German Empire continued preparations for the Olympics, the start date of which was still two years away. But the conflict became more and more fierce, and in March 1915, the German Imperial Olympic Committee sent a memorandum to the IOC, in which it announced the continuation of preparations for the VI Summer Olympics. The same document stated that Germany would only allow athletes from allied and neutral countries to participate in the competition. The answer came very quickly and was announced by the head of the French Olympic Committee, who said that the IOC would not hold the Olympic Games until 1920.
On this, the history of the 1916 Summer Olympics was completed, but the IOC left the VI number for the failed games in Berlin, and the next Olympiad in Antwerp was assigned the seventh serial number.
