Back When the Olympics Were Fun

The Chinese team dominated the 2008 Olympic Games, winning 51 gold medals, 15 more than second-placed USA.
But the Chinese are not the only ones celebrating. Great Britain finished 4th in the medal count, winning 26 total medals, 11 of which gold.
This is the best achievement by the British team since 1912. Impressive. I’ve decided to find out how exactly did they do in the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm, and found out some very interesting stuff.

The football gold medal for Britain required a 7-0 thrashing of Hungary in the second round, a 4-0 victory over Finland in the semis and a 4-2 victory of Denmark in the final. Not very convincing scores in those times as Finland was also defeated by the Netherlands 9-0 in the third-place match and Russia beaten by Germany 16-0 in the consolation tournament.
Finland, by the way, was represented by its own team, without actually being an independent state at the time but rather the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire. Interestingly, the Finnish team won 26 medals while the Russian won none.

The tennis competition that featured separate (!) events for indoor and outdoor, saw the British win 6 medals total, including a gold and a silver in the mixed doubles indoor event.
The shooting team won another 9 medals, none of which in the “running deer” events, which did not include shooting at actual running deer, but rather at deer-shaped targets with 3 circles on them.

But no medal was as satisfying as the silver medal in the tug of war event. Yes, tug of war.
5 teams signed up for the competition, but the teams from Austria, Bohemia and Luxembourg failed to appear, and so, for the first and only match, Great Britain represented by the City of London Police clashed with the local Stockholm Police. From the Wikipedia article:

The bout consisted of a best-two-of-three contest. The competition was held on July 8, 1912. In the first pull, the Swedish team steadily pulled the British squad across the center mark. After a five-minute break, the second pull was started. In this one, neither team gained the victory through pulling the other across the line, but after a prolonged stalemate a couple of the London men succumbed to exhaustion and sat on the ground, disqualifying them and giving the Swedes the victory.

Tug of war went on to be contested for the last time in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp.
Those were the days.