There were five teams entered: Austria, Bohemia, Great Britain, Luxembourg, and Sweden. The matches were scheduled to take place as a round-robin tournament from 7-9 July and 11-12 July, but Austria, Bohemia, and Luxembourg did not make an appearance, for reasons not known. Thus the only event was a single match between Great Britain and the host Swedish team, held on Monday, 8 July at 5:15 PM (1715).
The match was conducted on a sand track at the north end of the Olympic Stadium. The match was to be a best two-of-three pulls. In the first pull Sweden slowly pulled the British team over. During the second pull, some of the British team members sat down for better leverage, which was against the rules prohibiting contact with ground with any part of the body except the feet. When the British did not heed several warnings from the judges, they stopped the pull and declared Sweden the winners of the second pull. The Swedish team was made up of six members of the Stockholm Police Force, one member of the Göteborg police, and one fisherman from Sandhamn, a well-known yachting centre on an island 45 km. east of Stockholm. The British team was made up of members of the London City Police. Three of the eight British team members had pulled on the gold medal winning London Police team at the 1908 Olympics - Edwin Mills, Frederick Humphreys, James Shepherd. In addition, three further British tuggers in 1912 has also competed for the bronze-medal winning team at the 1908 Olympics, then representing the K Division Metropolitan Police Team - Walter Chaffe, Joseph Dowler, Alexander Munro. Sweden also entered a tug-of-war team at the 1908 Olympics, but did not place, and the 1908 and 1912 teams had no tuggers in common.
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