American James B. Connolly, one of the 311 athletes from 13 countries who took part in the Athens Olympics 120 years ago, almost missed out. It would have been a real shame for him if he had not even been able to try. He gave up his studies for the Olympics, as did several of his colleagues. The deans of the faculties were not interested in some Olympics that had not been held since 393, or perhaps 426, when Theodosius II ordered the destruction of all the pagan shrines, and they had never heard of the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The first Olympic Games of the modern era? What does that even mean? In truth, even the Baron was not quite clear what the Games were supposed to be, even though the idea was his and he invested an enormous amount of energy in making it a reality.
They weren’t quite right at the time, but James B. Connolly didn’t know that, because he didn’t know any different ones, and he knew that he wasn’t the only one who had a problem with Harvard’s leadership. His dean was a supporter of sporting activities, but he would not allow the venerable name of Harvard University, founded in 1636, to be associated with some obscure Olympic Games.
James B. Connolly did not exactly identify with Harvard. He was a 27-year-old first-year student who dropped out of school because of poverty, aged just 15, but he showed so much acumen in his work and so much zeal in his independent study that the headmaster of the Lawrence School of Natural Sciences persuaded him to study. He passed four out of five entrance examinations and became a Harvard student with special status.
“Life at Harvard was good, but not exactly exciting, while sailing across the vast Atlantic, through the Strait of Gibraltar … and so to the port of Piraeus, where Homer had to dock on his way to Athens, was surely a better way to spend pleasant afternoons,” he wrote years later.
He also claimed at the time that he walked up to the president of the Harvard Athletic Association in 1896 and took one look at his cat and knew he was in a hostile environment. He asked the President for eight weeks’ leave of absence, and the President allegedly told him that he only wanted to amuse himself in Athens at someone else’s expense.
Connolly was furious. After all, he was the US triple jump champion of the day and the American record holder, and now the President was not only insulting him, but also advising him to drop out of college and re-enrol when he came back.
When the story was later checked, they could find no evidence of its veracity, but they did find a letter in which Connolly, on 18 March 1896, or three days before he sailed from New York, asked permission to be absent from the ship between 21 March and 2 May because he intended to travel to Europe.
“I have the opportunity to travel and it won’t cost me a lot, which is very important to me. I may never be able to go again later in life”, he wrote, admitting that his studies will suffer a little, but for him “the educational benefits of such a trip are extremely important”.
The dean of Harvard did not think so, and refused his request, only to grant him an honorary discharge from the university. Officially, it said: “Dismissed March 19, 1896. Reason: Visit to Europe.”
Connolly made the trip under the auspices of the small Suffolk Sports Club because he could not go with the Boston Sports Association, with whom his Harvard colleagues were travelling. It was more elite than sporting and membership was reserved for the upper classes, and he was descended from Irish immigrants. Otherwise, the 14 American athletes could only dream of travelling to the Olympics in an organised way and having their expenses covered.
Connolly’s expenses were covered by his club and he ended up in Naples. He was immediately robbed. The local police demanded that he stay in Italy and sue the villain. They had never heard of an Olympics he was in a hurry to go to. They did “everything except tie my hands on my back to make me stay”, but he escaped, ran like a madman to the train station and hung on with his last strength to a train for Brindisi which was just pulling out of the platform.
“Three nice guys… grabbed me to stop me falling back overboard and dragged me through the window into the carriage,” he later recalled. Little did he know that if he had missed that train, he would have missed his show.
He believed he had 13 days to rest and prepare, but it turned out that he arrived in Athens on 5 April 1896, the day before the start of the Olympics. None of the Americans had thought that the Greeks counted time according to the Julian calendar, which is 13 days before the Gregorian calendar.
So, the day after he arrived in Athens after a long and arduous voyage from New York, he had to compete in what we now call the triple jump. He watched his competitors warming up. Instead of the then modern approach, they chose the ancient one. At the last moment, he changed his technique himself. He jumped the first time and he jumped the second time. He didn’t know how far he was carried. At that time, the results were not yet disclosed to the competitors on an ongoing basis.
He complained to the English coach who was standing nearby. The coach reassured him to go to the changing room and take a bath. As far as he was concerned, he said, he already had the victory in his pocket. It turned out that Connolly had jumped 13.71 metres, beating the runner-up by one metre.
Medals are awarded. Eighty thousand people rose from their seats, the American flag flew, the American anthem played. “I thought: ‘You’re the first Olympic champion in 15,000 years. And a moment later: ‘They’re going to be beside themselves at home when they hear that!'” He won silver, because gold was considered vulgar and was not awarded for the first time until 1904 at the Olympic Games in St Louis.
Two years after Athens, where he finished second in the high jump and third in the long jump, Connolly took part in and reported on the Spanish-American War for The Boston Globe, and in 1900 he went to the Olympics for the last time as a competitor.
The silver medal in the triple jump in Paris was perfect for him, as he and marathon runner Dick Grant were said to have lived as cloggers. Connolly walked eight kilometres to his performance because he had no money for a taxi, and he was hungry because he had no lunch.
The future did not bring him riches, but it did reward him with many maritime adventures. He dutifully chronicled them in books and became “America’s finest writer of sea stories”, as his colleague Joseph Conrad described him.
A fight to the death
But in the meantime he did a bit of journalism and in 1908 reported from London, which was hosting the Olympics because Vesuvius had erupted two years earlier and the Italians preferred to spend the money for the Games in Rome on repairing the damage.
London quickly took over as host, hosting the first truly international Games, with 2,000 athletes from 22 countries taking part. Today, London is the only city to have hosted the Games three times: the second time in 1948, when they were called the ‘austerity Olympics’ due to post-war shortages, and the third time in 2012.
In 1908, runners competed in a marathon. The favourite, South African Charles Heffernan, couldn’t hold off 22-year-old Italian baker Dorando Pietri. He started moderately, but then slowly worked his way forward and after 32 kilometres was only four minutes behind the leader Heffernan.
He saw that he had a chance. He accelerated and caught up with his rival at the 39th kilometre. He was only three kilometres from the finish. He and Heffernan were battling for the championship when the South African reportedly took a sip of champagne offered to him by a fan on the way and collapsed from nausea.
Pietri was left alone. American Johnny Hayes was not exactly on his heels. He was no longer holding back. He raced full speed ahead and arrived at the stadium.
At the entrance, he was greeted by the roar of the crowd. It was so powerful, he said later, that his energy almost pushed him back. 100,000 people stood on their feet and screamed.
He was completely exhausted, dehydrated and disoriented. He didn’t even know which way to turn. He collapsed. The Olympic officials flirted confusedly. People were irritably urging them to do something. The doctors got Petri back on his feet.
He stumbled forward and fell again. He was almost unconscious. He was brought to his feet again, climbed a few metres and collapsed again. Five times he lay on the ground, seemingly completely powerless, and five times he tried again.
“It is terrible, but fascinating, this struggle between a goal and a body utterly exhausted,” wrote Conan Doyle, the father of Sherlock Holmes, who covered the event for the Daily Mail at Lord Northcliffe’s request.
“He collapsed again and the hands of providence saved him from a heavy fall. He was a few yards from my seat. Between the crouching and grasping hands, I caught a glimpse of a gaunt face, a blank expressionless stare, a lock of sleek black hair over his eyebrows,” Conan Doyle further reported.
Pietri, who is just 1.52 metres tall, took 10 minutes to cover 385 stadium metres. His final time was 2 hours 54 minutes and 46 seconds. American Hayes crossed the finish line 32 seconds behind him. Pietri won and Hayes came second, at least until Pietri was disqualified for unauthorised assistance.
People were personally affected. It is true that they should not have helped him, but Pietri’s shocking struggle with himself, which led him straight to hospital, where he spent the next two and a half hours oscillating between life and death, shook them to the bone.
Queen Alexandra presented him with a special gold trophy the following day. The composer Irving Berlin wrote a song called Dorando. The King of England named his horse after it and people went crazy for the marathon.
It was rumoured that Conan Doyle had the idea for the Gold Cup and that Pietri was also disqualified because Doyle was one of those who helped him to the finish. Neither the first nor the second is true, but it is true that Pietri’s commitment to the goal touched him so much that he suggested that they raise money for it. He contributed £5 to the final £308 raised.
Pietri was supposed to use the money to open a bakery in his village, but he went to America and became a professional. He did not return home until May 1909, but spent the next three years more or less travelling.
“It’s true that I lost the match, but I won the glory and started on a path that has taken me far. My life now is so happy that the race seems like divine providence,” he said later, when the 1908 Olympic marathon was called the Dorando Marathon and the New York Times said it was no exaggeration to say that its finish was “the most thrilling sporting event that has happened since the marathon in ancient Greece, when the winner fell on his back and died on the wings of victory”.
The unexpected winner
And Frenchman Joseph Guillemot almost died on the battlefields of the First World War, where the two sides fought not only with ammunition but also with war gases. Many people died from mustard gas, but the “lucky” Joseph “only” carried it away with severely damaged lungs.
There was no cure for the disorder, but doctors prescribed long-distance running. He was supposed to run slowly, he ran faster and faster and surprised everyone around him when his lungs recovered enough to qualify for the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres.
Nobody expected him to achieve this remarkable result. After all, he was up against Finland’s Paavo Nurmi, who, although competing in the 5000m for the first time at the Olympics, was undeniably an exceptional runner.
He started quickly and continued at the same pace, but Guillemot did not let him out of his sight. On the last lap, Nurmi sped up and so did Guillemot. They were rushing towards the finish when Guillemot came into the race on the last corner and became the unexpected winner of the 5000 metres.
He tried to repeat the tactic at 10,000 metres, but this time Nurmi left him almost 8 metres behind. But his victory was not clean. The organisers moved the start of the race from 17:00 to 13:45 without informing Guillemot. So he ate a hearty lunch, ran 10,000 kilometres afterwards and promptly threw up on Nurmi at the finish line.
No barriers for Wilma
Unlike Guillemot, no one expected American Wilma Rudolph to even walk, let alone break three records and win three gold medals at the same Olympics. But Wilma’s 1960 performance in Rome, when she shone in the 100 metres, 200 metres and relay, was not about her speed, but about the will and heart with which she overcame the obstacles.
Her path has been strewn with them since 1940, when she was born prematurely and laid in bed. She spent most of her childhood there, during which she had pneumonia of both lung wings, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chicken pox and measles, or all the childhood diseases that are common today but were dangerous then.
Of course, polio has not bypassed it. She recovered, but at the age of six, her left leg ended up in a metal splint. “I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to get it off. But if you come from a big, wonderful family, there is always a way to reach your goal”, the black gazelle, as she was called by European journalists, later reflected.
She was the twentieth of twenty-two children born to her father Ed in two marriages. Even if all the siblings never lived in the same house, there were always enough of them in the bunch for some kind of mischief, like getting her braces off and chasing them around without them. Her leg was massaged every day and her mother took her to therapy once a week in Nashville, 145 kilometres away.
Wilma wanted so much to live like a normal child that she eventually did. At the age of 9, she finally got rid of an unwanted fashion accessory and played basketball for the first time in her life. She was good. Two years later, her brother put a basketball hoop in the backyard. From then on, her mother reported, she was not interested in anything else.
She was too short to play basketball, but she was so fast that she shone not only in her school, which of course was attended only by black girls, but also in the country.
But it was at that time that Ed Temple, the Tennessee coach, was looking for young sprinters. Not exactly by choice, the underage Wilma found herself on his team, but she soon fell in love with running, and with the team. Coach Temple did a lot for his girls, but he also expected a lot from them. Punctuality, for example. Every minute late brought an extra penalty lap. Wilma once fell asleep and arrived 30 minutes late. She ran 30 extra laps. The next day she was 30 minutes early.
She won her first Olympic medal, a bronze, in 1956 in Melbourne at the age of 16, and three golds in 1960. Not long after the Rome Olympics, they were in Cologne, Germany. So many fans were waiting for her that the police had to protect her, and at home the racist Governor of Tennessee wanted to give her a segregated reception. No, she said. Either everyone comes or I don’t. Her reception was the first integrated event in her home town of Clarksville.
Her achievements and the obstacles she jumped on her way to victory made her an inspiration to black Americans and a counsellor to those who needed help, as she worked as a coach after she retired in 1962.
She also founded the non-profit Wilma Rudolph Foundation, which provided an amateur sports programme in the neighbourhoods. Wilma used to tell young people, “The most important thing is to be who you are and to believe in yourself.” She reminded them again and again that “victory cannot be achieved without struggle”.
She never gave up, but she was no match for the brain tumour. She died aged 54.
High price of resistance
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, members of the US Olympic team that competed in Mexico in 1968, knew all about struggle, segregation and self-belief. On the track, they lived up to expectations: Smith won gold and Carlos bronze in the 200 metres, with the light-skinned silver medallist Peter Norman of Australia sandwiched in between.
The trio waited for the medals to be awarded. Smith and Carlos talked out loud about what would happen when they did what they were going to do. One of the possibilities they thought of was that they would be shot on the spot. They warned Norman that, like a trained runner, he should pay attention to the sound of the gun and throw himself on the ground as soon as he heard it, if he did.
It was 1968, a boiling point in a racially divided America, and it was October. Just a few months earlier, on 4 April, Martin Luther King Jr, a champion of black rights, had fallen to an assassin’s bullet.
The politically conscious Smith and Carlos wore white protest badges from the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Peter Norman wanted one too. Neither Smith nor Carlos had a redundant one, and neither did Paul Hoffman, a white and white member of the US rowing team and an activist of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, whom they met on the way to the podium. He gave Norman “the only one I had – mine.”
The trio are on the podium. She turned to face the American flag. Carlos and Smith stood behind the back of the silver Norman. “I didn’t see what was happening. I knew they had done what they planned to do when the singing of the American national anthem started until it was gone. The stadium went silent,” Norman later recalled.
During the American anthem, Smith and Carlos did not stare at the American flag or place their hands on their hearts. They lowered their gaze to the ground in silent protest and raised their black-gloved fists high in the air. Smith’s right hand symbolised the strength of black America, Carlos’s left the unity of black America.
They stood on the podium without trainers. Their black socks represented the poverty of Temopolitan America. The black scarf around Smith’s neck symbolised the pride of black Americans, the pearl necklace around Carlos’ was “for those who were lynched or killed and no one prayed for them. For those who were hanged or catharised. The pearls were for those who were thrown over the railings of the ships.”
All three medal winners wore Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. None of them had fallen under fire, but all of them were on the brink of hell – they just didn’t know it yet.
The International Olympic Committee accused Smith and Carlos of “promoting domestic political views” and expelled them from the Olympic Village. Hoffman, who gave his badge to Peter Norman, also had to go home.
He was lucky enough to be the son of a prominent judge and a friend of many influential Americans, so he was virtually untouchable. Smith and Carlos were not. They became targets of the white public and heroes of the black community, even though some accused them of exposing themselves to ten million television viewers for their own glory.
“I can’t eat it. The kids in my neighbourhood can’t eat it. They can’t eat the recognition, they can’t eat the gold medals. All they want is a chance to be equal human beings,” John Carlos refused.
It made no one associated with it an equal human being. With Smith, they were ostracised. They were threatened with death. Everyone was afraid of them. Even old friends no longer dared to associate with them. They did not want to be left without a job, just as their rebellion had left them without one.
John Carlos had to beg, borrow, steal and gamble for money. “I remember chopping furniture to get firewood and my wife looking at me like I was crazy. We heated ourselves with electricity, but I couldn’t pay the bill, so the children had to sleep by the fireplace.” His wife soon left him and committed suicide in 1977.
Tommie Smith has parted ways with his agent. His marriage has fallen apart. He was penniless and jobless. Two years later, he lost his mother. She suffered a stroke, supposedly because of the stress of farmers “sending her manure and dead rats in the mail, meant for me. My brother was kicked off the high school football team and my brother in Oregon lost his scholarship.”
Peter Norman, with whom they have remained good friends, has also been in trouble. Coming from a country where Aboriginal rights were widely denied, it was easy for him to identify with the struggle of Smith and Carlos, even though he was white.
Although he was not expelled from the Olympic Village, he was not allowed to compete in the 1972 Olympics, even though he had met the standard. Disappointed, he left competitive sport and ran only as an amateur.
Although he was Australia’s best sprinter and 200 metres record holder, he was completely ostracised from society and his family. He could not find work. He worked for a while as a gym teacher, fought against inequality as a trade unionist and occasionally earned some money working in a butcher’s shop.
When the injury caused gangrene, he could no longer manage. Depressed, he turned to alcohol for solace, which cost him his marriage. “If we were being pounded on, Peter had the whole country against him. He suffered alone”, John Carlos recalled with respect.
But Peter had a choice. If he had condemned his friends’ actions, he would have got a full-time job with the Australian Olympic Committee and his name would have been publicly cleared. Until his death in 2006, he did not budge a foot, even though he was not even invited to the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and was only allowed into the stadium as a guest of the Americans.
“Peter was a lone soldier. He made a conscious decision to be a sacrificial lamb for human rights. There is no one in Australia who should be more respected, revered and recognised than him,” said Carlos, who carried the coffin of a friend with Smith, with whom they shared a moment that made history.
On that day in 1968, he expected to see fear in his eyes. Instead, he saw “love. Peter didn’t even flinch. He never looked away, never turned his head.”
In 2008, Peter explained, “I didn’t understand why a black person couldn’t drink the same fountain water, ride the same bus or go to the same school as a white person. There was nothing I could do about this social injustice, and I certainly hated it.”
He was later told that his Olympic silver had unfairly gone unnoticed because of the protest, but he was “quite proud to have been part of it”. This, despite the fact that the event had not only marked his life, but also destroyed it.
The Golden Couple
But he was not the only exceptional runner to be erased from history for his personality and even in the same year, 1968, but on the other side of the ocean, in Czechoslovakia, and on a different occasion, the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring.
Until then, Emil Zátopek, winner of five Olympic medals, was one of the most popular citizens, after being almost the most recognised athlete in the world in the 1950s, even if he was just a simple boy who spent his youth in the shadow of war and found that hard work in the factory where he worked after primary school was easier if he ran.
At the end of World War II, he was already the fastest man in the country, but the 1948 London Olympics were within his grasp. He didn’t travel alone beyond the Iron Curtain, but his girlfriend, Dana, a javelin thrower, kept him company.
When he won silver in the 5000 metres, he wanted to show it to her. He waved her off to the girls’ boarding school, which had been turned into a women’s Olympic village in a general shortage. He lured her out of the room by whistling a tune they both liked and tried to explain to her by the pool what mistake had cost him the gold.
He was about to put the medal in her hand, but she fell into the water, and he jumped in after her without any clothes on, shaking off the water droplets naked just as the headmistress of the boarding school came by. Dana later recalled with a laugh that they did not understand anything she shouted at them, but that it was clear to them that Emil had to pick himself up immediately.
She and Emile were born on the same day, 19 September 1922, and he once suggested to her that they could get married on the same day. In the end, they did, one to the other. When they were climbing a lime tree to pick flowers for her mother, he said to her, “Listen, I think it would be very nice if we got married.” He had already been shopping for rings in Piccadilly Circus in London.
Of course, they were the wrong size, but when they returned from the British capital, where Emil had also won gold in the 10,000 metres, they had them melted down into a single ring. It was worn by Dana, the seventh-placed javelin thrower at the London Olympics.
Those games where journalists competed to see who could make fun of the Czech’s running style, which was fast but not graceful. “He runs like a man who has just been stabbed in the heart,” one commentator observed. Another mentioned that he was running as if he had a scorpion in his shoe, a third that he had just suffered a seizure, a fourth that he was in the middle of a wrestling match with an octopus, and so on.
Today he would be accused of wasting precious energy on countless unnecessary movements, but he could afford it, even though he said good-naturedly, “I am not so talented that I can run and laugh at the same time.”
But he could certainly run and chat at the same time. He said something to his fellow runners and chatted a little with journalists in the accompanying cars, and when he was walking or stationary, he had no inhibitions about people. To get to know as many as possible, he learned eight languages and mastered a few by force. He didn’t exactly kill himself with grammar. With enough vocabulary, it would come naturally, he explained, and he memorised words obsessively.
Because he was honest, open, approachable and always willing to help, he was loved by teammates and fans alike, but no one understood his work habits.
In winter, he used to run in army boots to make it easier for him to run in competitions. Sometimes he reportedly ran with Dana on his back. If she wasn’t there, he carried weights. His interval training was killer: he would sprint for 400 metres, then slow down briefly to rest, and sprint again. He repeated this 100 times and finally ran 40 kilometres, or almost a full marathon, with all his strength.
He is said to have learnt hard work in the Bata factory, where the rule was “When an obstacle appears, don’t go around it, go over it”. He has never denied that training is exhausting. “It is at the limits of pain and suffering that men separate themselves from boys,” he explained.
Excommunication and humiliation
But he did not preach, because he never preached to anyone. He was so conciliatory that the Frenchman Alain Mimou called him a “saint”. He did not know the word secret. He shared his sporting advice everywhere, even with his rivals. He gave one his socks and another his medal.
It was once home to Australian Ron Clark, who broke 17 world records but never won a gold in a major competition. After the visit, he escorted Ron to the airport and pushed a gift into his hands. Ron opened it later. Inside was one of the three gold medals Emil had won at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
When he ran the 5000 metres, his wife Dana was in the changing room preparing for her performance. She should have been thinking about him, but she couldn’t. She heard the roar of the crowd, but could not make out who was being celebrated. She rushed out.
On the way, she met a Russian coach. He couldn’t understand that she hadn’t watched her husband win the race. Then she met him. She jumped on him, jumping with excitement and shouting, “Oh my God, you won! How wonderful! Come, show me your medal!”
She grabbed it and the next moment it was in her bag. She took it for good luck, because she was about to face her big test. Emil was just taking a shower when his coach came in: “You won’t believe it: Dana set a record with her first throw. She’s going for gold! What a great day for us.”
With a throw of 50.47 metres, she really won. She only met her husband on the bus. “I will never forget the way he looked at me. As if he had never seen me before, as if I was a discovery. Later he teased me that I threw the javelin 50 metres because I was so happy about his victory. He said he had contributed significantly to my gold because he had inspired me.” When she had had enough of him, she told him to go and inspire another girl to throw the javelin 50 metres.
There was always a spark between them, but when he remembered that after winning the 5,000 and 10,000 metres, he wanted to run a marathon a little bit more, even though he had never done it, and he won this one, his third Olympic gold in one week, it was really fireworks.
“The biggest event in sporting history”, was how a British journalist described his arrival at the stadium after Emil had covered the marathon distance in 2 hours 23 minutes and 2 seconds.
But he almost wouldn’t, because he didn’t want to get on a plane without his friend Stanislav Jungwirth on board. They wanted to take the Games away from him for political reasons, but then they relented because without Stanislav, Emil would not have been at the Olympics either.
No wonder he was almost revered by his colleagues for his sportsmanship, generosity and warmth. He was Czechoslovakia’s greatest sportsman and the authorities did their best to keep him that way in the eyes of the citizens, but only until 1968, when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia.
Emil Zátopek, the public defender of the Prague Spring, took to the streets of Prague. In Wenceslas Square, he presented all his achievements to the Russian soldiers and asked them what they were doing. He believed in change, but his faith was premature. The dissidents were being wiped out by the Soviets, or “gangsters” as he called them.
Emil was too well-known abroad to die in mysterious circumstances or end up in prison, but he was kicked out of the army. In Prague, where he lived, there was no work for him anymore. Now he could only drill water boreholes in the ground in the remote Czechoslovak countryside and live with colleagues who reported him to the authorities instead of his wife. He was allowed to come home for a weekend every two or three weeks.
He was completely marginalised and erased from public memory. The burden of humiliation was heavy and so was the life of a manual worker. During his seven years of penal exile, he got drunk and turned from a man with the most enthusiasm for life into someone who was no longer recognisable even to himself, let alone to others.
He also suffered a personal decline, which was not forgiven by the rebels, and was no longer trusted by the authorities. When he was finally allowed to return to Prague, he was all alone. Although his name was officially cleared in 1989 and he was remembered at his death in 2000, he was never again Emil Zátopek, “the greatest man in the world”, as someone called him in the 1950s.
“We said no. We will never emigrate. The country was in trouble and we decided to stay. We were athletes. We believed we would survive. And we did,” Dana reflected after her husband’s death. But the price was high.
