Olympic villages, sports psychologists and lottery funding - modern athletes have never had it so good, according to one grandmother from Mitcham.

Aged only 16, and wearing home-made kit, Dorothy Tyler won Olympic silver in the high jump at the 1936 Berlin games. She didn’t have a coach or a set training program.

And even a world war, and a training diet restricted by rationing could not prevent her from winning another silver medal 12 years later at the 1948 games in London.

“It was a different world back then,” says 88-year-old Dorothy, now living in Croydon. “There are only little pieces left of the Mitcham athletic track where I used to train but I remember going down there from the age of 11.

“No one even coached me until after the 1948 games. I’d just run around the track and then jump a few times.”

She adds: “I’ve never made a penny from all the years of competing, judging and coaching at athletics events but now being an athlete is like a job.

“I had to work fulltime just to afford to go to the Olympics and that wasn’t uncommon. No one would give up their job for the games - they’d just take holiday time instead.”

But as the world’s attention turns to China in three weeks, with as much talk of questionable human rights records as sporting endeavours, the muddy relationship between politics and sport hasn’t changed a great deal in 72 years, according to Dorothy.

“There wasn’t anything like the same amount of publicity and in 1936 quite a few countries didn’t even send teams - mostly because they were boycotting Hitler.

“But there was a lot of interest in what was going on in Berlin at the time and the Hitler youth were all over the place. You could very much sense that they were preparing for war.”

In the aftermarth of World War Two, the 1948 Olympics in London were put together in just two years.

Dorothy says: “It was run on such a small budget and there was nothing like an Olympic village, but the event still made a profit.

“The men would stay in army barracks, the Candian team brought over their own food and the French even brought their own drink!

“Yet even without the money it was a terrific games and there was a real sense of the sun coming out after the dark days of war.”

And despite all the changes over the yerars Dorothy still believes the lure of the Olympics is as strong as ever. “I just can’t wait for Beijing - I’ll be glued to the telly like everyone else,” she says.