As Olympians finalize their preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics, parents of Olympians too are gearing up for the emotional roller coaster. At times, mothers can have an outsized impact on the development of their children – think Duke Ellington, Richard Nixon or Norman Bates.
In homage to one of their biggest customer segments, global fast-moving consumer goods company, P&G, has continued its “Thank You Mom” campaign, launching one of its most talked-about commercials two months ago. Hollywood director, Jeff Nichols, was hired to create its flagship commercial as a run-up to the Games. And while he took an uncharacteristically dark turn in theme, the commercial proved to be a viral hit.
The 2-minute commercial, Strong, tells the stories of athletes whose mothers protected them, sheltered them, comforted them during difficult or even dangerous times: a tornado, a car crash, air turbulence, bullying.
Yes, there are violins that help pull at your heartstrings.
US swimmer Katie Ledecky poses on the podium after winning gold in the women’s 800m freestyle final during the swimming event at the London 2012 Olympic Games on August 3, 2012 in London. AFP PHOTO / FABRICE COFFRINI (Photo credit should read FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GettyImages)
Katie Ledecky is as close to a sure thing there is. The 19-year-old already has a gold medal from her 800-meter freestyle victory at the 2012 London Games. Gold in the 400- and 800-meter freestyle at the Rio Olympics are considered a near lock.
Owner of the fastest times in 400- and 800-meter women’s swimming this year, Ledecky, the world record holder in both events owns eight of the ten fastest 400-meter times and nine of the top ten fastest 800-meter times…ever.
More incredibly, Ledecky has blossomed into a rare swimming competitor that has excelled at both mid and short distances. She also owns the fastest time in the world in the 200-meter freestyle, showing a diversity of performance that hasn’t been seen since the 1968 Mexico City Games. Back then, it was American teenager from Annapolis, Maryland, Debbie Meyer, who achieved an incredible swimming trifecta, winning gold in the 200, 400 and 800-meter freestyle events.
Katie Ledecky and Debbie Meyer
As Meyer reflected in this New York Times article, “When I watch her swim, it brings back so many memories.”
The Stanford University enrollee is primed for golden success in the 400 and 800 meters. Additionally, she has qualified for both the 200- and 100-meters. The Freestyle Queen will reign in Rio. The question is not how. It’s how many.
Just days after the rescue, four of Four of the heroes pose for a picture. From left to right: Gerry Vultee, Owen Hale, Bill Herwig and Duke Kahanamoku. ,Courtesy of Paul Burnett
It was a lazy weekend at Newport Beach in Los Angeles on June 14, 1925. Three-time Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku, had just woken up and stepped out of his tent on the beach at 6:40 in the morning for a swim. When he looked out onto the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, he saw a disaster unfold. A yacht named Thelma, carrying 17 people heading out to sea looking for tuna did not see the checkered flag, indicating unsafe waters.
Suddenly, a squall struck and waves as high as twenty feet high, were pounding the Thelma, and Kahanamoku watched the yacht list at a 45 degree angle on top of high waves, glass breaking, rigging and men flying overboard. Kahanamoku grabbed his surfboard and lept into the frothy waves.
Kahanamoku grabbed one man, then two, then a third, plopping them all on his surfboard before heading back to shore. By then, two of his camp friends, Owen Hale and Jerry Vultee, met him halfway and took the three survivors to safety. Back went Kahanamoku, as thrillingly relayed by David Davis in his biography of Kahanamoku, entitled Waterman.
Duke turned around, inhaled mightily, and jumped on his board. He dug into the water toward the Thelma. He secured two flailing fishermen and maneuvered them onto his board, then kicked towards Hale, Vultee, and safety. (Local meteorologist Antar) Deraga telephoned for assistance while his wife and a nurse, Mary Grigsby, wrapped the survivors in blankets and tried to resuscitate the unconscious men. Two bystanders, Charlie Plummer of Balboa and William McElhannon from Santa Ana, assisted in the rescue. For a third time, Kahanamoku turned to the sea. He picked up stragglers and placed them on his board until, finally, he could do no more.
Of the 17 on the Thelma, 12 were rescued, 8 saved solely by Kahanamoku.
Kahanamoku said little of this superhuman feat. But said J. A. Porter, chief of police in Newport Beach, “The Duke’s performance was the most superhuman rescue act and the finest display of surfboard riding that has ever been seen in the world.”
While surf lifesaving has become a profession as well as an international sporting competition, particularly in Australia, Davis explains that Kahanamoku himself wrote that his actions over 90 years ago made the surfboard de riguer for beach lifeguards.
“{The rescue] helped sell lifeguard service on the wisdom of keeping paddleboards at he guard towers. The boards soon became standard equipment on the emergency rescue trucks as well as at the towers. In short, some good sometimes comes from the worst of tragedies.”
Maureen O’hara, John Sheffield, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta
Johnny Weissmuller won five gold medals in swimming over two Olympics in Paris (1924) and Amsterdam (1928). But Weissmuller became globally famous after he was recruited by Hollywood to act out on film the iconic Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ character, Tarzan.
In 1958, Weissmuller had essentially retired from acting and was enjoying the life of renowned Hollywood celebrity, and was playing at a celebrity golf tournament in one of the hotspots for American celebrities – Havana, Cuba. As this article from The Smithsonian explains, “by the 1950s Cuba was playing host to celebrities like Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway. But the advent of cheap flights and hotel deals made the once-exclusive hotspot accessible to American masses. For around $50—a few hundred dollars today—tourists could purchase round-trip tickets from Miami, including hotel, food and entertainment. Big-name acts, beach resorts, bordellos and buffets were all within reach.”
Havana, Cuba in the 1950s
The Smithsonian goes on to explain that “the sugar boom that had fueled much of Cuba’s economic life was waning, and by the mid-’50s it was clear that expectations had exceeded results. With no reliable economic replacement in sight, Cubans began to feel the squeeze. Poverty, particularly in the provinces, increased.” It was very Americanization of Cuba and the diminishing economic prospects in this impoverished Caribbean nation that was an offense to a growing band of revolutionaries, headed by Fidel Castro.
According to the son of Johnny Weissmuller, Johnny Weissmuller Jr, in his book, My Father, Tarzan, the Olympian was headed to the golf tournament when he and his friends were stopped by Castro’s guerrilla troops. Foreigners were susceptible to being kidnapped by the Revolutionaries, so Weissmuller was at significant risk when his car was stopped and his guards disarmed. According to the now legendary story, Weissmuller decided to identify himself in the clearest manner possible – by beating his chest with his fists and letting rip his trademark Tarzan yell.
Suddenly the guerrillas realized they were in the midst of Hollywood royalty. They dropped their guns, shouted “”Es Tarzan! Es Tarzan de la Jungla! Bienvenido!”, shook the Ape-man’s hand, and got his autograph. Not only did Weissmuller make it to the golf tournament, he got a revolutionary escort to a golf course, the symbol of American capitalism.
I lived in Bangkok and Singapore for over 13 years, where it is summer year round, and the temperatures are commonly in the low to mid 30’s Celsius (high 80’s Fahrenheit), and sometimes high 30’s Celsius (100+ Fahrenheit). And for every single one of those years, I had a nice big swimming pool within 10 meters of my apartment.
Jumping into the pool was an absolute delight!
But not for high-performance swimmers, athletes who have trained by jumping into water 12 degrees (20 Fahrenheit) colder than their body temperature, since they were kids. The bracing shock apparently never goes away.
“The worst part about being a swimmer? Jumping in the pool.”
“Jumping into the water when It’s 6am in the winter – it is the last thing you want to do.”
“It’s the worst part of any swimmer’s day.”
Click on the above picture or go to this link and see grown men and women revert back into little kids just thinking about it.
He won six medals in one day, including three gold and two silver medals, at the Third Olympiad, the 1904 St Louis Olympics.
This despite his competitors having a leg up on him. Literally.
The St Louis Summer Games was the first time medals had been awarded to the top three finishers of an event, and it was also the first time that an athlete had performed with a leg prosthesis. American, George Eyser, had lost his left leg in an accident involving a train, so he ambulated and competed using a wooden leg.
At the top of the page is a picture of the prosthesis, which I admit, looks pretty good for early 20th century medical technology. Even so, try to imagine Eyser running fast enough or jump high enough on that wooden leg. Try to imagine him sticking a dismount off of the horizontal bar. I can’t. And yet, he won gold in the parallel bars, long horse vault, as well as the 25-foot rope climbing events, took silver in the pommel horse, and bronze in the horizontal bar. At the least the last activity mentioned didn’t require so much from the legs.
Natalie du Toit
It wasn’t until 2008 when the second athlete with a prosthesis for a leg performed in the Olympics – Natalie du Toit, a swimmer from South Africa who competed in the 10 kilometer swimming marathon. More famously another South African, double-amputee Oscar PistoriusOscar Pistorius, ran in the 400-meter race at the 2012 London Olympics on carbon-fiber prosthetics. Those j-shaped modern engineering miracles and Pistorius’ athletic ability earned the runner the very cool nickname, Blade Runner, once upon a time.
It is Eyser alone, of this incredible trio of athletes, who stands firmly as Olympic champion.
Nearly 60 million people in the world are considered refugees. If refugees were considered a sovereign nation, it would be the 22nd largest country in the world, in between France and Italy. But in France and Italy, its citizens live in relative safety and freedom. In the nation of Refugee, citizens live in perpetual instability, with little choice where they can reside.
To highlight the plight of refugees globally, the International Olympic Committee, in partnership with the United Nations Human Refugee Agency (UNHCR) made a wonderful decision to include a team of stateless athletes, to be called the Team of Refugee Olympic Athletes. They include a Syrian swimmer living in Brazil, and another living in Germany, two judoka from the Republic of Congo both now living in Brazil, a marathon runner from Ethiopia training in Luxembourg, and five middle-distance runners from South Sudan, who all live and run in Kenya.
Over 5 million people have perished in the ongoing civil wars in The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yolande Mabika was separated from her parents in the midst of fighting. Orphaned she ran the streets alone as a young child, until she was picked up, put in a helicopter and placed in an institution for displaced children in the capital of Kinshasa. She learned judo, and became so good that she was selected to represent her country at the World Judo Championship in Rio de Janeiro, where, outside of the competition, she was held in captivity by her own coach. Having had enough, she left the hotel started her life as a refugee in Brazil.
With the advent of the Arab Spring, Syria began its descent into a long, cold winter. Since the Spring of 2011, the Syrian government has lost control of half of its country, fighting a long and bloody fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), creating millions of refugees in the process. Syrian swimmer, Yusra Mardini was in a boat with 20 other Syrians attempting to flee the murderous chaos of their country for what they hoped was safety across the Mediterranean Sea. But their rickety boat was taking on water. Mardina jumped in the water with her sister Sarah, and pushed the boat to Greece. Finally finding asylum in Berlin, Germany, Mardini is training for the 200-meter freestyle event in Rio.
South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, after decades of civil wars. Unfortunately violence due to ethnic conflict has continued, displacing anywhere from 20 to 50,000 people. James Nyang Chiengjiek escaped South Sudan at the age of 13 to avoid being forcibly recruited as a child soldier in one of the various militias involved in the conflict. He became a teenage refugee in a Kenyan camp. And when he joined a school that had a
Duke Kahanamoku with film star Henry Fonda (1905 – 1982) who is draped in leis. Fonda is in Hawaii for the filming of ‘Mister Roberts’.
Kahanamoku first achieved Olympic glory in 1912 in Stockholm, Sweden, but because of the cancellation of the 1916 Olympic Games, Kahanamoku had to figure out how to remain an amateur for 8 years until he competed again at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium.
Only a few months after the 1912 Stockholm Games, gold medalist pentathlete and decathlete, Jim Thorpe, was stripped of his medals and amateur status because he took home pocket change for playing semi-pro baseball in 1909 and 1910.
Kahanamoku, who considered Thorpe a friend, was crestfallen, and was reported to have said, “Jimmy Thorpe was the greatest athlete there ever was. He could do everything. And what happened to him was a bad break for sports and for everyone.”
When Thorpe was stripped of his medals, Kahanamoku and his backers had to be cautious. So, according to author David Davis, when the citizens of Hawaii raised money for Duke Kahanamoku after his gold-medal winning performance at the 1912 Stockholm Games, they weren’t sure how to provide it to him lest they risk Kahanamoku losing his amateur status. And if Kahanamoku lost his amateur status, and could no longer compete in AAU events or the Olympics, then Kahanamoku’s ability to draw tourists and opportunities to Hawaii, it was thought, would diminish. Eventually, a house was bought by a trust company, and Kahanamoku was able to move into a new home. The trust was set up so that he could never re-sell the home. The flip side of the deal is that the powers that be in Hawaii probably kept this transaction under the AAU radar.
While it is possible that Kahanamoku received cash very quietly for appearances at exhibitions all over the world, as well as for low-key advertising campaigns in a pre-television, pre-internet world, Kahanamoku did not financially benefit from his immense celebrity while he was an athlete. This was true even after Kahanamoku had surrendered his amateur status and tried to make it in the world of film. His Hawaiian “otherness”, however, got him typecast as the quiet pacific islander surfer, or native American Indian chief. He was never able to rise to the easy heights of fellow swimmers, Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, or Buster Crabbe in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers films.
Anita Stewart and Duke Kahanamoku in what I think is the 1927 film Isle of Sunken Gold
Kahanamoku is credited with appearances in 14 feature films, including the WWII naval classic, Mr Roberts, with Henry Fonda and James Cagney. But one film that is not mentioned is The Beachcomber, a film made shortly after Kahanamoku’s triumph in Stockholm. It never got distributed in the US, as it was seen as a threat to Kahanamoku’s amateur status. Here is how David Davis explains it in Kahanmoku’s biography, Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku:
Before returning to Hawaii, Kahanamoku made his motion picture debut in The Beachcomber, shot on an unidentified beach in Southern California. The one-reel silent film was directed by its star, Hobart Bosworth, a pioneer in Hollywood’s nascent movie industry. (Bosworth also was a friend and business associate of the author Jack London.) Duke did not have to stretch much to play a native islander who swims out to rescue Bosworth’s character from drowning. Publicity shots showed him wearing nothing more than a sarong. Bosworth had to delay releasing the film, however, after it was discovered that “the champion might lose his right as an amateur if swimming for money,” according to Motion Picture News. It is unclear whether The Beachcomber was ever shown or distributed in the United States, although foreign audiences reportedly were able to view the stirring flick.
On May 1, 2015, I kicked off my blog, The Olympians, with the intent of providing at least one blog post every day. Here we are, 365 days, over 10,000 visitors, nearly 20,000 views later, and I have kept my promise. Many thanks to all those who have helped me along the way!
Surfing is as Australian as vegemite. Champion surfers from Australia are commonplace. The image of an Aussie lifeguard on his surfboard to the rescue is now clichéd. Some of the biggest brands in surfing wear – Quicksilver and Billabong – are Australian. And even though the UGG Australia is an American brand, the company was started by an Australian surfer.
Australia is over 5,600 miles away from Hawaii. But when Duke Kahanamoku came to Australia in 1914, the locals must have thought he was from another planet. Kahanamoku was world famous, which is saying a lot for that time. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, a natural on the water, Kahanamoku was such an amazing swimmer that he got on the US Olympic team and won a gold medal in the 100 meters, and a silver in a relay race at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.
Duke Kahanamoku, Cronulla Beach Australia, 7th February 1915
Thanks to the stunning photos of Kahanamoku standing erect on his board while riding the waves in Hawaii, and his accomplishments at the Olympic Games, Kahanamoku was invited to compete in swimming events in Australia and New Zealand. He had heard that surfing on the beaches of Australia was illegal, so he didn’t bring his board. But when he arrived and was told that surfing was in fact legal, he said he would build a board himself. According to author David Davis in his wonderful biography of Kahanamoku, Waterman, Kahanamoku went to a lumberyard, got the wood he wanted, and shaped an eight-and-a-half foot “round-nosed, square-tailed board”.
Kahanamoku wowed them. Davis quotes The Sunday Times (Sydney), from December 27, 1914:
Duke Kahanamoku at the Freshwater Clubhouse, Australia, with the board he made on arrival
“Kahanamoku was the ‘human motor boat,’ wrote one observer. ‘So lightning like was the movement that all one could see was a dark figure – it might have been a post for all that the spectators knew – flying through space. We had known him only by repute; we had seen him in pictures in one of his famous attitudes – standing on his surf board, being borne shorewards on the crest of a wave, a smile on his dusky countenance, and there were a lot of us who imagined the poster to be grossly exaggerated; too theatrical, in fact. But we are wrong. The man on the poster is the Duke all right, but the picture errs on the side of modesty.'”
It is legend that Kahanamoku was the first to surf on Australian shores. But that is not the case. Brothers, William and Tommy Walker of Australia appear to have purchased a surfboard in Hawaii and brought it back to Sydney before Duke was on the scene. But there is no doubt that Kahanamoku, his presence, demeanor and skill, made him and surfing a phenomenon.
“Kahanamoku was the first expert to surf in Australian waters,” wrote Davis. “And, as he had done previously in places like Atlantic City and Southern California, his skill at ‘walking on water’ inspired numerous followers. At least three of the young people whom he directly touched on the 1914-1915 trip – Claude West, “Snow” McAlister, and Isabel Letham – grew up to become influential figures in Australian circles. Once
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