The Big Boy

The kid from California was only 17, and almost unknown. But last week in Wembley Stadium, husky 6 ft. 2 in. Bob Mathias, in two days' grueling competition, outran, outthrew, and outjumped 34 competitors, to win the Olympic Games decathlon. In victory, at an age when most youngsters are still gangling and ill-coordinated, he had proved his right to be classed with such all-round athletes as Carlisle's Jim Thorpe and West Point's Glenn Davis.

It took staying power and icy nerve, as well as muscle and precision. The first day, under dismal rain, he had sweated through the 100-meter dash, broad jump, shotput, high jump, and 400-meter run. He failed to place first in a single event that day (though he tied five men in the high jump), but he was never out of the running either; the young giant hovered just behind the flashier winners, steadily piling up points. Bob Mathias (rhymes with defy us) was in third place when he tumbled into bed that night.

Discus in the Rain. The second day dawned cold and rainy. Mathias won his heat of the 110-meter hurdles, rested a while under a blanket on the wet ground, and then got up to make a mighty discus heave. But for a while no one knew just how far it was, or whether it would count, because someone had accidentally knocked over the marker showing where the discus fell. For about two hours, raincoated officials plodded around the soggy field looking for the marker. They found it at last, and measured out the longest toss of the day: 144 ft. 4 in.

Evening had fallen, and the floodlights were on, when Mathias cleared the pole vault (11 ft. 5 3/4 in.). After that, with an official marking the foul line for him with a flashlight, he threw the javelin. The few spectators who stood in the drizzling gloom could barely see the shaft as he hurled it 165 ft. 1 in. It was getting on towards midnight, and Mathias had only the 1,500-meter run left to do. If he could make it in anything like decent time, the championship was his. But could he? The boy from Tulare, Calif. (pop. 12,000) was weary, and showing it.

Foot Race in the Dark. Like someone heaving, lead-footed, through a nightmare, Mathias rounded the dark track. Somehow on the homestretch he managed a little spring, and finished in 5:11. It was pitifully slow time, but enough to clinch his victory.

He was led around for a few minutes to catch his senses and his breath, and then they took him to the stands where his parents and two brothers were waiting for him. He was speechless at first, and his mother was in tears. After a painful silence, he managed to speak. "I've never worked longer or harder," he mumbled. "I'm hungry. I had steak for breakfast, but that seems days ago."

"I don't want my baby ever to do it again," Mathias' mother told reporters. "It's too hard."

Next day Bob agreed, thought he would retire from decathlon competition, the undefeated champion. That didn't mean he was through with athletics: it was in his blood. In his senior year of high school this year, he was captain and fullback of Tulare's championship football team, a basketball letterman, captain of the track team (California scholastic champion in the high & low hurdles). He hasn't decided where to go to college, but leans to Stanford.

Mathias was not the only surprise winner. Last week's Olympics provided London with a lot of upsets, some disappointments, and an impressive handful of new heroes & heroines. The U.S. was sweeping it. There was no official scoring of teams (the Olympics are meant to be individual, not national, contests), but Wembley Stadium spectators had to sit through the victorious blare of the Star-Spangled Banner again & again & again. Sportwriters' score cards showed the U.S. out in front 2 to 1, with Sweden second and France third. In last week's competitions:

P: Just before the 200-meter final, U.S. Sprinter Mel Patton (TIME, Aug. 2) stretched out on the locker-room floor and dejectedly told a reporter that he was "just not up. I'll probably finish last." He was dead wrong. Patton beat Barney Ewell by inches. "For the first time in my life," he glowed afterwards, "I forgot to float. I just kept digging."

P: Jamaica's favored Herbert McKenley lost the 400-meters to a fellow Jamaican, a pounding giant named Arthur Wint, who passed him about a dozen yards from the tape and won at 0:46.2 to equal the Olympic record.

P: Sweden was expected to take the classic 1,500-meter race, and it did, but the "wrong" Swede won it. Fireman Henry Eriksson, who played second-fiddle in his own country, sloshed home first on the puddled red track two seconds slower than the Olympic record. The favorite, Lennart Strand, who had beaten Eriksson at least 15 times, was second.

P: The U.S. swimming team, studded with such stars as Yale's Allen Stack and Philadelphia's Joe Verdeur, swept the men's swimming and diving championships clean. In the women's division, California's Ann Curtis set a new 400-meter record (5:17.8) and pretty, 23-year-old Mrs. Victoria Manalo Draves, part-Filipino wife of a Pasadena, Calif, electrical engineer, took both the springboard and high-diving titles.

P: A 30-year-old Dutch housewife, long-legged Mrs. Fannie Blankers-Koen, made Olympic history by winning four gold medals: in the women's 80-meter hurdles, 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and as anchor man in the 400-meter relay. She is the wife of The Netherlands' track & field coach, and a mother of two.

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