A tall figure, erect and military, ascends the rostrum on the field as a hush spreads over the audience. He grasps the American flag with his left hand and raises his right to the sky. All over the field the athletes raise their right hands. Then, in a clear voice, come Lieutenant George G. Calnan’s words:
“We swear that we will take part in the Olympic Games in loyal competition, respecting the regulations which govern them and desirous of participating in them in the true spirit of sportsmanship for the honor of our country and for the glory of sports.”
This inspiring account of the opening ceremony of the tenth Olympiad held on 30 July 1932 at Los Angeles is quoted from the official Olympic report of that year. A member of the Naval Academy Class of 1920, Lieutenant Calnan was selected by the U. S. Olympic Committee to lead the world’s athletes in taking the Olympic oath in honor of his part in four Olympiads as a member of the U. S. fencing teams. Although Lieutenant Calnan performed in more Olympiads than any other Naval Academy man, at least 73 other Naval Academy graduates or midshipmen have participated in the various Olympiads since the founding of the modern games in 1896. Indications are that several more will make the 1960 U. S. contingent that competes in the games at Rome, from 25 August through 11 September.
While most Navy men are aware of the outstanding accomplishments of the 1920 gold medal-winning crew at Antwerp, and of the 1952 crew, which won the world’s rowing championship at Helsinki, they may not know that Naval Academy men have had unusual success in winning in a number of other sports.
The winning of a gold medal in the Olympic games is symbolic of world championship in a given sport, since the best athletes in the world compete. First place is especially difficult to attain for a naval officer, whose career must come first. Several countries of the world have never won a single gold medal—yet the U. S. Naval Academy, an institution devoted to turning out officers for the fleet and not champion athletes, has won twenty individual gold medals as well as many silver and bronze medals for second and third places.
These accomplishments by Navy men in the Olympics are a measurement of the aggressive spirit and intense desire to win which have long been traditional in the training of midshipmen at the Naval Academy.
Olympic Beginnings
The first Olympiad of which there is a definite record was a 200-yard foot race at Olympia in 776 B.C., but the games had originated centuries before that. The Greeks alone took part in the ancient games, which became so important through the years that time was measured by the four-year intervals between them.
Foot races were the only contests in the first thirteen Olympiads, and these became increasingly difficult, with the runners eventually wearing full armor—helmet, buckler, and greaves.
Gradually, other sports were added. In the eighteenth Olympiad, both wrestling and the pentathlon were introduced, and chariot racing was added in the twenty-fifth. The champions were crowned with wreaths of wild olive, and renowned sculptors carved great statues of the victors.
Although the games originally were of a deeply religious and ceremonial nature, they became so professionalized and corrupt that they were abolished in 383 A.D. in the 293rd Olympiad.
Until 1893 the Olympic games were all but forgotten. Following the Franco-Prussian War, a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, became so disturbed by the dissension in his country that he returned to the idea of a great athletic contest as a way to unite the people in a common cause.
He extended the plan, however, to include the nations of the world. The following year an organizational meeting was held in Paris, with delegates attending from many nations.
In 1896, the first of the modern games was celebrated in Athens. Fourteen American athletes took part in three of the seven events on the program. There were 285 athletes from thirteen competing nations—which is far below the present-day participation in the games by some 6,000 athletes from about seventy nations.
First Navy Olympic Athletes
There is no official record of a Naval Academy man taking part in an Olympiad prior to the fifth games at Stockholm in 1912.
The first Naval Academy class to be represented in any games was the Class of 1895, with Lieutenant Commander Harris Laning serving as captain of the U. S. rifle team, which placed third in world competition at Stockholm.
Lieutenant Carl T. Osburn, Class of 1907, also was on the 1912 rifle team and scored highest in team standing. He ranks next to Calnan in Naval Academy participation by competing in three Olympiads. World War I prevented the holding of the games at Berlin in 1916, and the long delay and general apathy precipitated a reorganization of the American Olympic Committee in December 1918, when an effort was made to have members of the Committee represent a wider variety of national sports organizations throughout the country.
Navy Helps the Olympic Movement
The 1920 games at Antwerp marked the beginning of the importance of the Olympic movement, which slowly gained momentum in the 1924 games, accelerated at the 1928 games, and reached a peak of world-wide popularity in the 1932 games at Los Angeles—and this in spite of a nation-wide depression. Each successive Olympiad has grown in world influence and participation from then on.
The year 1920 also marked the first organized participation by the Army and Navy. The largest number of Naval Academy men ever to take part in any games competed in the seventh Olympiad at Antwerp. The Navy contingent was transported to Belgium in the armored cruiser, USS Frederick, with a strenuous training program conducted en route.
Osburn, then a commander, won a gold medal in the 300-meters Army rifle; individual, standing event. He and Lieutenant Commander Willis A. Lee, Class of 1908, took part in the team events which won five firsts, one second, and a third.
In the 600-meters Army rifle team, prone event, there was a triple tie for first place between the United States, South Africa, and Sweden. In the shoot-off, the United States placed first, with Lee scoring third high on the five-man team.
First Navy Olympic Crew
The first appearance of a Naval Academy crew in Olympic competition was in 1920, with the United States setting a new world record with a time of 6:2.6. The races were rowed on a 165-foot wide canal between Antwerp and Brussels. Training quarters were in an old inn about five miles from Brussels. The windows of the inn had been blown out during the war and about all that was left were four walls and a roof. Frederick came to the aid of the crew, however, with ship cots and provisions.
Due to the narrowness of the canal, the races were rowed in heats. On the first day of the trials, the captain’s gig from Frederick was used as a referee’s boat, but her propeller became clogged with grass which grew along the shores. From then on autos were used by the officials.
The Navy crew defeated Belgium in the first heat, won over France in the semi-finals, then met the Leander Club of Great Britain in the finals. Navy rowed forty strokes to the minute, with the Leander crew starting at 42. The United States dropped the stroke to a long, powerful 38, with Leander stroking at forty and steadily pulling ahead. Navy trailed by three-quarters of a length at the halfway mark and dropped as low as a 37 stroke—but Leander never went under a forty. Then Navy raised their stroke to a forty and crossed the line half a length in the lead.
In the last few yards of the race, Navy was shooting ahead of their opponents at a rate of about four feet every stroke. The U. S. coach was Richard Glendon, crew coach at the Naval Academy, and the team manager was Commander Joe Morrison, Class of 1905.
Three Naval Academy gymnasts won first-, second-, and third-place medals in the rope climbing event at the 1932 games at Los Angeles. Ensign Raymond H. Bass won the gold medal over his teammate, Lieutenant (junior grade) William J. Galbraith, by one-tenth of a second. Bass set a new record with his time of 6.7 seconds. The bronze medal winner, Midshipman Thomas F. Connelly, had a time of 7.0. However, rope climbing has not been included in the Olympic program since 1932.
The eleventh Olympiad at Berlin in 1936 brought the revival of the torch relay. A Greek runner carried a lighted torch from Olympia, which was passed on to 3,000 relay runners who carried it across Southern Europe to Berlin. There it touched off the Olympic flame.
World War II cancelled the twelfth Olympiad, scheduled for Helsinki in 1940, and also the 1944 games, which had been intended for Tokyo. London was the site of the fourteenth Olympiad in 1948. England was still suffering from the World War II aftermath; although facilities were not unified in an Olympic village, the teams were billeted as near their scenes of competition as possible.
Ensign Robert E. Cowell placed second in the 100-meters backstroke swimming event. His time of 1:6.5 was a tenth of a second behind that of the U. S. gold medal winner—and this in spite of a severely strained back.
Navy’s 1952 Crew
The fifteenth Olympiad, celebrated at Helsinki in 1952, reached a new peak in games participation, organization, and quality of performance. Finland was still burdened by heavy war indemnity, but the games were noteworthy in many ways: this was the first time the enemies of World War II—the British, Americans, Finns, Germans, and Russians—had met in peaceful competition, and this was the first time that the U.S.S.R. had competed in the games since 1912.
Almost 6,000 athletes from 69 nations took part in seventeen sports. The great Paavo Nurmi’s record for the 10,000-meters run was broken fifteen times. There were more records broken here than at any other Olympiad.
One of the outstanding performances was that of the U. S. world champion eight-oared crew, whose members were all Naval Academy men. The Navy crew, coached by Russell “Rusty” Callow, had earlier won the National Rowing championship.
The rowing course was located at Meilahti, on an arm of the Bay of Finland. The 2,000-meters course was very well laid out in lanes marked by buoys with an overhead marker every 500 meters.
In the preliminaries, the U. S. crew won first place by defeating Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and Portugal. In the semifinals, they defeated Russia and Australia in a three-shell test. The U. S. crew had half a length of open water over the second-place Russians.
According to Olympic rules in rowing, the defeated crews of the preliminaries and semifinal rounds compete again and from these races the four best crews are selected to compete against the top crew in the finals.
In the final heat, on 23 July, the five crews competing for the world championship were: lane 1, Great Britain; lane 2, United States; lane 3, Russia; lane 4, Australia; and lane 5, Germany.
According to Ensign Charles D. Manring, the coxswain, this is the way the Navy crew rowed: “We went off the mark at forty for twenty strokes, then settled to a 32 for the middle distance. At every 500- meters marker we took a ten-stroke punch. On the last 500 meters we went to a 36, and the last 100 meters the crew hit as high as they could go.” When asked how they won, Manring put it this way: “We got out in front and stayed there.”
The United States won by a length and a half over the second-place U.S.S.R. crew, with Australia placing third. The Navy crew never lost a race in the entire competition. This performance kept intact an unbroken victory record of the United States in the Olympic eight-oared event since it was started in 1920.
The Naval Academy also manned the four- oared shell-without-coxswain, with the crew making a good showing in spite of a little hard luck. They won their first heat decisively, but one of the crewmen became ill. Since there can be no substitutions after a crew has rowed a race in Olympic competition, the crewman—with a doctor’s permission and after a night in the hospital—continued in competition, but the crew did not place.
The sixteenth Olympiad, held at Melbourne in 1956, was the first games ever to be held in the southern hemisphere. Although the crisis in the Middle East involved a number of competing nations, and some had to cancel their teams’ appearances, others had already arrived in Melbourne.
The games took place during Australia’s summer months, from 23 November through 8 December, with 67 nations participating. The United States had a contingent of 430 athletes and officials. Although the great distances involved made transportation difficult for some countries, the location was responsible for the participation of seven others for the first time: Ethiopia, Fiji, Kenya, Liberia, Malaya, North Borneo, and Uganda.
The Olympic Organization
Since 1924, the Olympics have been staged in two divisions: the winter games and the summer games, which are always held the same year. Some eighteen sports will be on the program at Rome this month, with five sports having been played on the winter program at Squaw Valley in February.
The games must be held every four years but in the event of their cancellation—due to war conditions, for example—neither the order nor the intervals can be changed. In any Olympiad there is an art exhibition. This summer, the exhibition will depict sports through a historical cycle covering a period of more than thirty centuries.
The planning of a modern Olympiad is an undertaking that demands the utmost in international co-operation. There are three main groups which carry out the Olympic movement. First is the International Olympic Committee, which is the world’s governing body for the games. The I.O.C. drafts the general program and determines the standards of amateurism for all competing athletes. It selects the city where each Olympiad is to be celebrated, and its Executive Committee constitutes the Jury of Honor or appeal during the games.
There is a National Olympic Committee in each of the ninety nations recognized by the I.O.C. Some 52 of these nations have representatives on the I.O.C. with no country having more than three. The committees work with the sports associations of their countries, and their job is to certify the competitors for the games. When a city is appointed as the site for an Olympiad, the national committee of the country concerned assumes the over-all responsibility of the management of the games.
Every sport on the Olympic program is governed by an International Federation, which controls the conduct of the sport in world competition. In order to work as a unit, these three groups meet occasionally in an Olympic Congress.
Much credit is due the members of the Armed Forces in the success of the Olympic movement, both in fund raising and in participation. The Department of Defense authorizes this participation and aids in the transportation of team members to the site of the games.
Official permission is also granted for the use of various bases for pre-games training of service athletes. In 1948, the fleet wrestling champions trained at the Naval Academy and won the National A.A.U. championship. In 1952, the Armed Forces wrestling team was in training at the Academy and again won the National championship.
Contributions from the Armed Forces are a big factor in helping send the U. S. teams to the games. In 1956, the Navy raised over $72,000 in the fund-raising campaign, and the Marines raised over $57,000. In 1952, when 20 per cent of the U. S. athletes were in uniform (with 36 medals won by servicemen), $36,000 was raised by U. S. soldiers fighting in Korea. They also raised additional funds to help send the Korean team to Helsinki.
The total cost of financing American participation in an Olympiad is estimated at one million dollars. But due to the great distance involved in sending the contingent to Melbourne, the 1956 budget was boosted an extra half-million. Expenses mainly are for transportation of athletes and officials to and from the games, their housing, feeding, and uniforms.
Celebrating the Games
Preparations for the games are begun years in advance of the actual celebration. An organizing committee is formed of members of the community of the host city, and all necessary stadia or facilities are built for the occasion. Gate receipts are retained by the host city, and, after all expenses are met, the remaining profits go to the National Olympic Committee for use in the further promotion of the Olympic movement and for the development of amateur sport.
The modern Olympiad provides an opportunity for the participants, as well as visitors, to meet other people from all over the world and to establish new ties in international friendship. The site of the games becomes a Mecca for world travelers.
An Olympic village is established at every Olympic site to serve as quarters for the athletes and officials from all competing nations. The village has definite boundaries and is governed by international law. The official languages are English, French, and that of the host country.
The opening ceremony is held in the major stadium before an estimated 100,000 visitors. The torch to light the Olympic flame is brought by relays of athletes starting from Athens and carried across land and sea and air to its destination. In 1956, the torch was carried 13,000 miles, from Athens to Melbourne. The colorful parade of the nations into the Olympic stadium is always led by the athletes from Greece, with all other nations following in alphabetical order. When all the sixty or more national contingents are on the field and facing the Olympic flag, the Olympic oath is taken by the athletes. The flags of all competing nations encircle the stadium and the Olympic village.
The Olympic symbol consists of five colored circles on a field of white. Representative of the five continents, these circles are linked together to denote the sporting friendship of the peoples of the earth, regardless of creed or country. The colors of the rings are blue, yellow, black, green, and red—colors chosen because at least one of them appears in the flag of every nation in the modern world.
The words Citius, Altius, Fortius, which often appear under the circles, mean “quicker, higher, more strongly,” which denote the athlete’s endeavor to run faster, jump higher, and throw more strongly.
In the final competitions, the first-, second-, and third-place winners in each event are called to the podium, where they are awarded a gold, silver, or bronze medal, respectively. While the national anthem of each winning athlete is played, the flag of his country rises to the masthead, with that of the gold medal winner rising on the center pole, that of the second-place winner on the right-hand pole, and the flag of the third-place winner on the left. The three flags reach the apex of the poles simultaneously. This moment alone is worth all the hours and months—even years—of training that are necessary to become the best athlete in the world.
This summer, visitors to Rome will find that the Foro Italico Olympic Centre is located in a beautiful district to the north of Rome, between the wooded slopes of Monte Mario and the Farnesina hills, with the area also bounded by the Tiber River. The Stadio Olimpico, built in 1950, is considered one of the most perfect buildings of its kind in the world, with other stadia built nearby for various sports competitions.
The newly constructed Olympic village will accommodate 8,000 athletes and officials comfortably, with the facilities to include over a dozen restaurants, tourist offices, and post offices. A new bridge has been built over the Tiber to facilitate the flow of traffic. No motor vehicles, other than those used to transport the athletes, will be allowed in the village.
The Olympics and the Navy
Through the years, Navy men have given freely of their limited time to the Olympic movement. Rear Admiral Thomas J. Hamilton, USN, (Ret.), Class of 1927, represents the N.C.A.A. on the U. S. Olympic Association. Each branch of the Armed Forces has a representative on the U. S. Olympic Committee.
Others work in various ways, such as Captain Stephen M. Archer, USN, Class of 1932, who was an official in world wrestling competition at Helsinki. Lieutenant Commander Josiah Henson, USN, Class of 1945, who won a bronze medal in wrestling at Helsinki, was an official at Melbourne and will officiate this summer at Rome. Commander Charles Shuford Swift, USN, Class of 1944, who made the U. S. wrestling team in 1952, but did not compete due to a severe injury in training, was manager of the U. S. wrestling team at Melbourne. Lieutenant William J. Hippie, USN, Class of 1952, who was manager of the national champion Navy crew in 1952, was assistant manager of the world champion crew at Helsinki.
At this writing, several sports are still in the process of holding tryouts to determine their teams. Three Navy fencers may make the 1960 U. S. fencing team: Ensign Roland R. Wommack, Class of 1959, the present Pan American champion in Epee; Midshipman Joseph Palletta, Jr., Class of 1960, defending A.A.U. national champion in Foils; and Midshipman Alfonso Hector Morales, Class of 1960, Modern Pentathlon and Sabre.
As all naval officers know, the naval service is dedicated as the first line of defense for the United States with the ships of the fleet ready to proceed to any part of the world to keep order. In a sense, the ideals of Navy men and the Olympic movement are the same: the maintenance of peace throughout the world.
1960 Tryouts
On 9 July at Syracuse, New York, the 1960 Naval Academy Varsity Crew defeated an All-Star Field to become the third Naval Academy crew to represent the United States in the Olympic Games. Coached by Louis G. Lindsey, the members of the crew are William C. Long, 1961, Coxswain; Lyman S. A. Perry, 1960, Stroke; E. Warren Sweetser III, 1960, No. 2; Gayle R. Thompson, 1961, No. 3; Joseph A. Baldwin, 1961, No. 4; Peter G. Bos, 1960, No. 5; Howard T. Winfree, 1961, No. 6; Robert B. Wilson, 1961, No. 7; and Mark W. Moore, 1961, Bow.
In New York City, also on 9 July, the three Naval Academy Fencers mentioned above all earned places on the 1960 U. S. Olympic Fencing Team. Coach for the team will be Andre R. Deladrier, the Naval Academy Fencing coach.
The results of the 1960 tryouts bring to 83 the number of navy men who will have participated in the Olympic Games by the end of this month.
Because the official Olympic records and the Naval Academy records on Olympic participation are not complete, there are undoubtedly some Navy men who have performed in the Olympics, but who are not listed herein. Any reader who has additional information is urged to submit the facts to the Secretary-Treasurer for possible publication under Comments and Discussions.
Mr. Swartz is Head Coach of Wrestling and Associate Professor, Department of Physical Education, at the U. S. Naval Academy. He coached the U. S. Olympic wrestling team in 1952 and is chairman of the Olympic Wrestling Committee for the 1960 games, as he was in 1952. He judged Olympic wrestling in 1932, 1948, and 1956. Mr. Swartz is co-author of Championship Wrestling, published by the Naval Institute.