Leaped Over Despite Eight (Or 10) Gold Medals, This American Athlete Gets Little Attention

Ray Ewry overcame childhood polio to win 10 gold medals in an undefeated Olympic career, but he rarely gets mentioned with nine-time winners Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi among the greats of track and field.

That’s because Ewry won his golds in standing jump events long ago discontinued, against relatively small competitive fields, and two of them came in the 1906 games the International Olympic Committee considers unofficial.

“It’s awfully difficult to compare - those games were a garden party compared to today’s extraordinary competition,” said historian John Lucas, who has studied and written about the Olympics for three decades.

“But yet, this man was an athletic marvel for any generation in any age,” he said.

Born in Lafayette, Ind., in 1873, Ewry early in life was confined to bed, then used a wheelchair, until doctors advised that he needed to exercise to develop his muscles.

Apparently, Ewry took the advice to heart, building his long, lanky legs into powerful jumping springs.

He tried out for basketball and football with little success, but competed in jumping events while attending Purdue, where he studied mechanical engineering as a graduate student.

He went to the 1900 Games in Paris, winning golds in the standing long jump, standing triple jump and standing high jump, in which he set a world record of 5 feet, 5 inches.

He returned in St. Louis in 1904 to again sweep the three events.

The standing triple jump was dropped, so he had to settle for two more golds each in 1906 and 1908.

While training for the 1912 games, he would write later, “I received a note from old Dame Nature in a rheumatic twinge.” He decided to end his Olympic career. The standing jump events were discontinued after the 1912 games.

He was equally adept at an event that never made it to the Olympics - the backward standing long jump.

He was credited with a jump of 9 feet, 3 inches, going backward.

Newspapers dubbed him “The Human Frog,” “The Rubber Man,” and “The Greatest Jumper on Earth.”

Ewry became a professor at Purdue and later lived and worked in New York. He died in 1937.

Although listed in most authoritative Olympic guides with 10 gold medals, there usually is an asterisk or parenthetical notation that two came in 1906.

“The status of the Interim, or Intercalated or Athenian Games of 1906 is still a subject for argument,” Mel Watman wrote in his “Olympic Track & Field Athletics Guide.”

“In one sense they cannot count as a normal Olympics as they took place halfway through an Olympiad … but, they were certainly promoted by the Greeks as Olympic Games and Olympic medals were awarded,” Watman wrote.

IOC records, the official history of the games, list Ewry with eight golds; topping the list with nine apiece are Lewis, Nurmi, swimmer Mark Spitz and gymnast Larysa Latynina.