The story of London’s first Olympic Games a hundred years ago is in salutary contrast to the Olympic story today. Created for the modern age in 1896 when staged in Greece, the Games subsequently flopped in both Paris (1900) and St Louis (1904). The 1908 Games should have been held in Rome, but in 1906 Italy warned she would not be able to mount the games after all. In Italy’s place, London was given twenty months to build a stadium and to make all the necessary arrangements to host a world event.

Twenty months. Where today it can take London ten years to build a football stadium, our doughty Edwardian forefathers had a 90,000 seat stadium up and running inside two years. The previously shambolic organisation of the International Olympic Committee was straightened out, proper rule books were introduced, and Gold Medals were instituted for winners. Only the Americans, perhaps still smarting from their mismanagement at St Louis, remained dissatisfied – complaining later that British officials were prejudiced against them.

In the Games themselves, Britain’s performance was as triumphant as their staging of the event. Britain led the Gold Medal table, winning 56 compared to America's 22, and as soon as the Games were over the disgruntled Americans broke off relations between themselves and the British athletic organisations. ( At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, America would house her team separately from her rivals in a transatlantic liner, to which athletes from other nations were only grudgingly invited. Visitors marvelled at the luxury, while American athletes complained that the liner was too small.)

Those spats were still to come. Of more consequence to the 1908 Games was the stormy July weather. The rain, the unseasonable cold and the newness of the event kept crowds away. Something had to be done. The press was encouraged to hype the spectacle and advertising was increased. The King and Queen and a clutch of stage personalities were encouraged to attend, in the hope that if people didn’t know the athletes they had at least heard of the King. But the real break-through came when the infamous Maud Allan promised to attend.

Maud Allan was the sensation of the season, a sell-out at the Palace Theatre and at more lucrative private performances. An exotic dancer in the tradition of Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari, her dance in The Vision of Salome was nicknamed The Dance of the Seven Veils. Maud Allan’s dance represented Salome before her step-father, King Herod, a dance which culminated in her demanding as payment nothing less than the head of John the Baptist. Rumour said the dance was little more than a high-class striptease, and the rumours were helped by a crafty publicity campaign boosted by many thousands of sexy photographic postcards. (Postcards were another mania of Edwardian days: the British public sent each other an astounding two million cards a day, at a time when a card inviting a friend to tea could be posted in the morning in the expectation that a reply would be received, by card again, that afternoon.)

Maud’s costume was scanty – especially on the postcards, where she appeared to wear little more than a pair of bejewelled breastplates and a swinging skirt fashioned out of flowing chains and pearls. Her dance was ‘artistic’, she insisted – and it became the must-see show of its day. Audiences were peppered with the rich, the aristocracy and the famous. Maud herself was taken up by high society. Society ladies wanted her at their soirees; society men wanted her too.

Who were the men in Maud Allan’s life? Rumour had it that she’d been the King’s mistress. She had danced naked for him, people said, in Marienbad. She had, for that matter, danced with lions in a cage in Budapest. She had danced with a bleeding human head.

When it was revealed in the press that Maud Allan would attend the Olympic Games the response of the public was as if she were opening them afresh. The first days had drawn disappointing crowds, for the Olympics were not in those days a world spectacle. The King and Queen had been a draw but when Maud Allan, the scarlet princess, appeared, the 90,000 crowd cheered as if the stadium had been erected specially for her. When she waved from the royal terraces the popular acclaim roared back like a national obeisance. She signed autographs but did not mingle with the crowd. On her return to the Royal Box with the Prime Minister’s wife Maud Allan waved to her largest audience. (The Prime Minster’s wife was Margot Asquith with whom, many people said, Maud was also having an affair.)

London’s 2012 Games seem unlikely to bring any similar sensation. Instead will be the all-too-familiar stories of drug misuse, cheating and huge unrecoverable expense. Hopefully, the stadia will have been built on time and the facilities will work. After all, Britain has done it before. The Edwardians got the whole thing up and running in just two years, and when London next staged the Games, in 1948 with the country virtually bankrupted by war, we once again had stadia erected and a transport system in place inside a couple of years.

Can we do the same this time? Britain will have had seven years, where our predecessors had two. We’ll have a vastly larger budget. We’ll also have learned from each of the recent Games, each of which was preceded with gloomy warnings of budget overruns and late-running building plans, yet which somehow pulled through. Each recent host has fought – often in a desperate last-minute scramble – to avoid being the first country to fail. Soon – inevitably, gloom-mongers say, because of the ever-expanding size and remit of these gargantuan Games – soon a country must fail. The task has become too big, and must in the end become impossible.

Might that happen in 2012? Let’s hope not. Let’s hope Britain heaves itself to the finishing line with its usual mix of panic, hope and fudge, and somehow pulls itself over the line. Let’s hope the vast array of organisers get the buildings up on time and that, despite the gloom-mongers, the Games themselves are a success. Because if we stumble this time there will be no Maud Allan to save our necks.