Real Footage of the 1908 London Olympics?

The 1908 Olympics were originally set to take place in Rome, Italy, before Mount Vesuvius devastated the southern city of Naples. Once it became clear the capital couldn’t host the Games due to the financial impact of the disaster, London was selected as the substitute host city, according to Olympics.com.

Alleged footage from those Olympic Games has circulated for many years since, and resurfaced in a Reddit post published during the 2024 Paris Olympics: 

(AccomplishedStuff235 / Reddit)

The video had amassed more than 3,300 impressions as of this writing and also appeared elsewhere on social media. The colorized footage was shared on X, whereas black-and-white versions of the clip were shared on Facebook and amassed more than 7.5 million views on TikTok. 

Snopes looked into the authenticity of near-identical clips in 2021, when we rated a similar claim “Mostly True.” In that original report, we located the origin of the near-identical clips to a 2020 post on the official YouTube account of Great Britain’s Olympic Team (Team GB):

We rated the similar claim “Mostly True” in 2021 because the most popular version of the footage circulating at the time featured one clip that wasn’t from the 1908 Olympics, but rather was captured two years earlier. That clip showed penny-farthing bicycles at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, which were “interim” Olympics hosted in Athens, Greece. They were not considered to be official Olympic Games, according to Greek News Agenda — an English-speaking platform of the Secretariat General for Public Diplomacy and Greeks Abroad of Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

However, we rated this article’s claim as “True” because all the clips in the 2024 version of the video, albeit colorized, matched the footage originally shared on YouTube by Team GB in 2020, which did document events from the 1908 London Olympics.