A marvellous celebration of the Corinthian Spirit.

Rating: 10/10 (30 November 2008)

I write this comment on a wet,dark November morning in Cambridge.Through my window the roof of Gonville and Caius' Master's Lodge is slick with the drizzly rain,and I can imagine the shade of Harold Abrahams - one of it's most notable alumni - running down Senate House passage,laughing,half - hidden under his umbrella,a girl on each arm. In 1924 the University was far more an elitist establishment than it is now,and Abrahams may well have considered himself something of an outsider but most of his fellow students were far too well brought up to be impolite to him.An added bonus would have been that he was rather good - looking and - obviously - a top class athlete. When he "Beat the clock" in the race round the Great Court at Trinity College it further boosted his popularity amongst his peers. Incidentally Lord Coe,head of London's bid for the 2012 Olympics,pulled off the same feat 40 - odd years later. In "Chariots of fire" we are not seeing a cross - section of British society in the early 1920s.The Amateur code dominated sport.Professionalism was a dirty word.In cricket there were Gentlemen and there were Players(Professionals).I remember going to Gentlemen vs Players matches in Surrey as late as the 1940s,the old values were dying hard.The Professionals were almost exclusively working class who had been excluded from athletics at its highest level because of the predominance of the Gentleman Amateur.Men like Abrahams,Liddell and the fictional Lord Lindsay. The Corinthian Spirit was abroad.To compete was an honour in itself. No drugs,no food supplements,no "Athletics Scholarships",no Lottery Money.No cheating.Just endeavour and sportsmanship.How quaint that all may seem after the most expensive Olympic Games in history where the nation's gamblers funded "Team GB" to success on a raft of money. And yet.......to me there is something eternally appealing and very British about the cult of the gifted amateur in an era when everybody is obsessed with "winning" and athletes can become millionaires overnight and consider silver medals an insult. "Chariots of fire",happily,does not concern itself with such heresy. It is a wonderful evocation of the complex social mores of Upper Class British life in the immediate post World War One era when the Donkeys who had led the Lions on the battlefields of Europe were having one hell of a last hurrah before bending their knees to the inevitability of history. It may not contain enough cheery cockneys and canny northerners to satisfy some people but to have done so in such a context would have been a distortion of the facts.Their time was to come. Instead it features a class whose values and moral code was on the verge of extinction.And that was not,arguably,a cause for celebration.