The Strength of Ten

(See Cover)

Finland braced itself this week for an invasion. Planes and ships, loaded to capacity, were already disembarking the advance guard of an expected 40,000 foreign visitors to the Olympic Games at Finland's capital. Helsinki's main boulevard, the Mannerheimintie, was lined with store windows displaying the five-colored Olympic rings. In the 10 local newspapers, news of the imminent games almost crowded out the G.O.P. convention in Chicago and the war in Korea. Some householders were demanding, and getting, sky-high prices for bed & board. Helsinki's restaurants hurriedly recruited an extra 2,500 helpers, who were subjected to a brief course in the pronunciation of French wines and liqueurs.

In the Olympic village at Kaepylae (where all but the women's contingents, the Russian team and their satellites were quartered), clouds of Finnish autograph hunters buzzed around the visiting athletes like hungry mosquitoes: "Sign pliss. Your name, pliss." Next to the big U.S. team (350 men and women), neatly dressed in their blue Olympic blazers, grey slacks and gabardine hats, the squad that attracted the most attention was the closemouthed Russian team, some 400 strong, which was constantly convoyed by 300 stony-faced "officials." Making their first Olympic appearance since the Czarist days of 1912 (when they didn't win a single gold medal), the Russians had apparently abandoned their idea of shuttling the Red athletes by airlift in & out of Helsinki each day. Instead, they were immured in a separate "Little Iron Curtain" village, six miles from the Olympic Stadium. But they were plainly on their best behavior. Located next to the U.S. boathouse, Russian oarsmen jovially insisted on lending the Americans a scull.

Olympic Truce. How good were the Russians? Nobody knew. But the broad-backed Russian women, who claim seven world records, were expected to dominate the women's track & field events. Standing virtually alone against them was the amazing Netherlands housewife, Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals at the 1948 London games. One first-rate Russian showing is almost certain, and in a game that even the Russians admit the U.S. invented. Olympic fans hope that the Russian basketball team, European champions in 1951, will meet the U.S. in the final.

As Baron Erik von Frenckell, Helsinki's mayor, proclaimed this week the traditional "Olympic truce" (a throwback to the B.C. days when the Greeks called off their local wars to celebrate the games), there were a few inevitable rhubarbs. Both Nationalist and Red China, along with East Germany, suddenly and belatedly demanded admission for their teams. Bulgaria, which drew Russia in a first-round soccer match, complained bitterly when a soccer "unknown," The Netherlands West Indies, drew a first-round bye.*

But the 1952 Olympics would also mark the end of some past enmities. Both Japan and West Germany were competing again in the Olympics for the first time since World War II. Germany's Olympic trials had already produced a sensation when Werner Lueg, a 20-year-old West-phalian, equaled the world record for the 1,500 meters ("metric mile") with a clocking of 3:43.

In all, a record 6,500 athletes from 69 nations were ready to compete for Olympic medals,* in 149 events, ranging from basketball to yachting, from boxing to wrestling, from canoeing to weightlifting.

Speed v. Staying Power. Each country had its special sport. The French and Italians have always led the field in cycling, the French and Hungarians in fencing, the Swiss, Czechs and Germans in gymnastics. For the U.S., the Olympics have always been a track & field show, dominated by the U.S. since James B. Connolly took the first modern Olympic title at Athens in 1896 with a running triple jump (now the hop, step and jump) of 45ft.

This year, as usual, the U.S. team is strongest in track & field events. No one seems to stand a chance against the U.S.'s three shot-putters, Parry O'Brien, Darrow Hooper and Jim Fuchs, all capable of beating the European record by a good two feet. In the pole vault, an event the U.S. has lost only once, the Americans this year have two 15-footers, Rev. Bob Richards and Don Laz, who are expected to finish one-two, with the U.S.'s George Mattos in third place. The best U.S. high jumper, Walt Davis, is in a stratosphere (6 ft. 10 1/2 in.) by himself.

The U.S. should have little trouble in the sprints and hurdles, with men like Harrison Dillard (no-meter hurdles), Charles Moore (400-meter hurdles), Andy Stanfield (200 meters) and Mai Whitfield (800 meters). But as the races lengthen from 1,500 meters to the 26-mile marathon, the Swedes, Finns, Slavs and Britons take over.

This perennial weak spot of U.S. athletes is explained by European critics as an accurate reflection of U.S. preoccupation with speed rather than guts and staying power. But this year, as in 1948, the U.S. has an answer to that. In the decathlon (ten events for one prize), the closest modern parallel to the original Olympic Games, no one has yet touched the record of Olympic Champion Robert Bruce Mathias.

Champion's Confidence. A lineal descendant of the ancient pentathlon,* the decathlon is the most searching test of athletic skill and endurance ever devised: four running events (100, 400 & 1,500 meters and the 110-meter hurdles); six field events (javelin, discus, shotput, pole vault, high jump and broad jump). At 21, already a veteran of eight decathlon meets, four times national champion and the world recordholder, handsome Bob Mathias meets to a remarkable degree the physical specification for this Olympic challenge. He is tall (6 ft. 3 in.), with the reaching stride of a hurdler or high-jumper, and husky enough (200 Ibs.) for the heavy-duty weight events. He has the steel-spring legs of a sprinter, the back muscles of a pole vaulter and the barrel chest of a distance man. He also has the nerveless self-control to make the most of his natural advantages, and the confidence of a champion who knows that his only real competition is the law of gravity and the pull of time.

Bob used to suffer through pre-meet agonies. "In my first meet," he says, "I kept thinking about that 1,500 meters I was going to have to run [the last event in the decathlon]. It always scared the devil out of me." But gradually he learned to "just keep thinking about the event I'm in while I'm competing in it. They don't give you points for worrying."

Nevertheless, he still gets a slight tightening of the stomach before he goes into action. "It's like waiting for a funeral," he says. Once the meet begins, his nervous twinges disappear. He moves with disciplined relaxation; even at the finish line his face shows only concentration, with none of the agonized contortions of a last-ounce effort. As the competition gets keener, the only apparent effect is to key his reactions a bit tighter and sharpen his sense of timing. "When the pressure's on," he says, "I like it best." Between events, while other athletes trot nervously back & forth, talking and worrying, he tosses a towel over his head and lies down in the shelter of the stands until he is called for the next round. Sometimes he falls asleep.

"Dream Competitor." During the whole exhausting two-day grind that a decathlon lasts, Mathias is as cool and impersonal as a coach directing a football team, constantly checking in his mind the complicated point score, deciding when to push himself to the limit, when to hold back to conserve his energy. Even when he was a green 17-year-old at the 1948 Olympics, he steadfastly refused to take his turn at the pole vault until the bar was set at 10 feet. He saw no point in wasting his energy on heights he was sure he could clear. His final vault: 11 ft. 5 3/4 in.

"You can't predict what he can do," says Ray Dean, Stanford's assistant track coach. "All you can be sure of is that he will win. He is absolutely the greatest athlete I ever coached. He is the dream competitor--the one in 10,000 who has the temperament to match the talent."

To the proud citizens of Tulare (pop. 14,000), Calif., probably the only town in the U.S. where the decathlon is the most popular after-school pastime, Coach Dean is guilty of understatement. In Tulare (pronounced to Larry), Bob Mathias is rated, quite simply, as the greatest athlete in history--a sort of peerless combination of Jack Armstrong, Frank Merriwell and Gene Tunney. Says one admiring Tularean: "No matter who you are, you've got to like him if you've seen him the way we have. If you were a mother or father, Bob's the kind of guy you'd want for a son; if you were a fellow, you'd want him for a chum; and if you were a girl--well, just look at the guy."

At least part of these claims is substantiated by the record books. Compared with the man generally considered the outstanding athlete of all time, Mathias outruns, outjumps and out-throws Indian Jim Thorpe* in nine of the ten decathlon events. The exception (see chart) the 1,500-meter run.

Though Bob can dash 100 meters in 0:10.7 (Olympic record: 0:10.3), a childhood case of anemia still leaves him short of the endurance required to run the metric mile. It is just about his only athletic shortcoming. He is a one-man track team, capable of winning the majority of U.S. college track meets singlehanded. His best official discus throw, 173 ft. 4 in., is 2 in. better than the Olympic record.

In other sports, he does almost as well. He was an all-state basketball player in high school. At Stanford, after giving up football for two years, he tried out for the team last fall as a junior. His plunging power and breakaway speed (his 96-yd. kickoff run-back against U.S.C. sparked Stanford to the Pacific Coast championship) prompted veteran Coach Pop Warner, who coached both Thorpe and Ernie Nevers, to say: "Mathias is the closest thing to a miracle worker I've seen in 60 years." After a few rounds of golf, Bob already shoots in the low 80s.

Sunday Track Meet. Bob's athletic prowess is not entirely an accident of birth. His father, a onetime University of Oklahoma all-state football player, is a general practitioner and Tulare's high-school team doctor. The whole Mathias household has always been dedicated to athletics. Brother Eugene, 24, was a promising high-school football star until his career was cut short by a concussion; Jimmy, 18, is an up & coming decathloner (he finished 19th in the nationals); Patricia, 15, the family hopes, will be an Olympic swimmer in 1956.

Almost from infancy Bob had an amazing sense of coordination. "He never fell off chairs or ran into things," Dr. Mathias noted. When eight-year-old brother Gene began bringing his friends home to play ball, they tried to shunt five-year-old Bob aside. But they soon discovered their mistake. "The older kids noticed that Bob threw the ball harder than they could--and could catch it better," Mrs. Mathias recalls. "So Robert [the family all call him that] made the 'team' even back then. We knew we had an athlete on our hands."

The Mathias backyard in those days was hopping with juvenile athletes. "Morning, afternoon and night," says Mrs. Mathias, "it seemed that a track meet was going on in our backyard. On Sundays the parents would come over and watch their children compete. Ours was one home that never had a garden--just a garden of kids."

In the eighth grade, at the age of 12 1/2, Bob entered his first real track meet. He high-jumped 5 ft. 6 in. The same day, Gene was competing in a high-school meet, where the winning height was 5 ft. 5 in. "There just wasn't much doubt about it," Mrs. Mathias says, "the boy was beginning to get awfully good."

In high-school track (1945-48), Bob won 40 first places and broke 21 records. He was only a fair student. When he came home once with a rare "A" on his report card, he grinned self-consciously: "Well, Mom, I guess I'm a grind now." There was nothing mediocre about his growing athletic record. As a football fullback he averaged almost nine yards a carry. Tulareans have it that one team didn't even try to stop him: "They just let him through, peaceful like." In basketball, in his senior year, he averaged 18 points a game. In the West Coast relays in 1947, he won the shot, discus and high hurdles, tied for second in the high jump and ran the anchor leg on Tulare's winning relay team.

By the Book. By the end of the 1947 track season, there was no doubt that Bob was on the way to becoming one of the nation's top athletes. But it was almost an accident that sent him toward the decathlon, and to the Olympics in 1948. Even Tulare High School's Track Coach Virgil Jackson was a little vague about the decathlon, an event that, in those days, most of the U.S. had never heard of; he was not even sure of the name. Jackson wrote to the A.A.U. for information, finally got a book, published in Finland, which gave the official decathlon rules. After he found out what the decathlon was, Jackson decided that it was just the thing for Bob's versatile talents.

Bob had never pole-vaulted, had never even seen a javelin, never broad-jumped nor run the 400-or 1,500-meter races in competition. The running was mainly a matter of conditioning, and finding out how to pace himself. Learning to measure his stride and developing a take-off lift for the broad jump was not too difficult. But the pole vault and javelin throw were another matter.

Coach Jackson ordered a javelin from San Francisco, and Bob spent all summer working out with it, practicing his grip without ever trying a throw. During the 1948 track season, he concentrated on perfecting his form in regular events: high hurdles, broad and high jump. Not until three weeks before the Pasadena games did he first start pole-vaulting and throwing the javelin, following the instructions laid down in a track manual.

"Don't Worry, Mom." Jackson now admits that he was really looking ahead to the 1952 Olympics, and was just trying to get Bob interested in the idea. But Bob had quietly decided not to wait for 1952. In the Pasadena meet he threw the javelin 171 ft., pole-vaulted 11 1/2 ft. and fought his way to first place. Two weeks later, at the National Championships (and Olympic tryouts) in Bloomfield, N.J., Bob easily beat Irving ("Moon") Mondschein, three times national champion, to become the No. 1 decathlon man on the U.S. Olympic team. A month later, 17-year-old Bob Mathias stepped into London's Empire Stadium before a crowd of 80,000 spectators, to compete in his first Olympic Games.

At the end of the first day, Bob was in third place. But he told his mother: "Don't worry, I'll be up there for the victory ceremony tomorrow." Next day Bob was dressed and on the field at 9:30 a.m., ready for the final five events. A persistent downpour, mud and cold--the worst Olympic weather anyone could recall--slowed down competition. In between events Bob napped and conserved his energy, stuffed down two box lunches to keep himself going.

He had to wait almost eight hours to take his turn at the pole vault. Fighting exhaustion and gathering darkness, Bob made his vault of 11 ft. 5 3/4 in. while officials marked the take-off point with a white sneaker in the 9 p.m. gloom. At 9:15, running up to a foul mark lit with an official's flashlight, he threw the javelin 165 ft. 1 in.

Not for a Million. By that time it was so dark that the only light in the stadium was the Olympic flame, glowing dully through the fog. Mrs. Mathias, huddled patiently in the stands, watched the start of the 1,500-meter race, at 10:30: "We could see the orange spurt when the gun started the runners, but the fog was so dense we could see nothing else." Fighting foot cramps and a sick stomach, Bob staggered across the finish line five minutes and eleven seconds later to clinch his title. When he got his wind back and found his mother, he said: "Mom, how did I ever get into this? I wouldn't do it again for a million dollars."

But next day, standing on the victory pedestal as he had promised, Bob had changed his mind. Says his mother: "When my child stood out there with 80,000 people at attention, and they raised the flag and the massed bands played The Star-Spangled Banner just for him, I thought my heart would burst."

When the news of Bob's victory was flashed to Tulare, the whole town exploded into a celebration that lasted most of the night. Factory whistles blew, auto horns honked, somebody started a parade and led it with a big sign: "Bob Mathias for President." The Tulare Advance-Register rushed out an extra with a 114-point banner headline: MATHIAS WINS OLYMPIC TITLE. "Biggest headline I've ever run," says Editor Tom R. Hennion.

When Bob came home, two weeks later, 10,000 Tulareans lined the road from the airport to the town. Mayor Elmo Zumwalt presented Bob with the keys to the city. At the Elks Club, the reception was so warm "that we threw away the key." Governor Earl Warren's speech of welcome was heard by thousands of happy Tulareans at the fair grounds. Nowadays, Southern Pacific railway conductors call Tulare "Mathiasville." Signs at both ends of town proclaim: "Tulare, Home of Bob Mathias, Olympic and U.S. Decathlon Champion."

Big Man on Campus. The honors kept rolling in on Bob Mathias, culminating in the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete. Bob was besieged with offers of athletic scholarships. But Dr. Mathias, who can afford not to accept such offers, firmly turned thumbs down. "I wanted Robert to go to school with no strings attached," Dr. Mathias explains. "They should give the scholarships to boys who can't afford to pay their own way."

Bob entered Pennsylvania's Kiskiminetas Springs School to get ready for college, the next fall entered Stanford. There, as he keeps piling up new records as a track and football star, he is inevitably a popular Big Man on Campus and rushing chairman of his fraternity (Phi Gamma Delta).

None of the adulation seems to have changed Bob much. He likes to go to dances occasionally (he has no steady girl). He brushes off all discussion of his triumphs with an embarrassed grin. At his white stucco home in Tulare, just a good javelin throw from the local high school, he still shares with brother Jimmy an attic bedroom, a cluttered place littered with Bob's medical specimens (he once wanted to be a doctor like his father), his model airplanes, and a sign he once rescued from a rubbish heap: "A winner never quits and a quitter never wins."

Proud & Loud. He has already won enough trophies for a lifetime, and he does not expect to compete in the decathlon again. Instead, he will concentrate at Stanford on one or two specialties, probably the discus and hurdles. He will also concentrate on his studies (he is a physical education major with a B average). After college, he thinks he might get a coaching job or a public-relations post with a sporting-goods firm. But when he graduates next spring, he will turn in his red & white Stanford uniform for Marine Corps green. As a reserve lieutenant, he faces a two-year hitch on active duty that will come to an end just short of the 1956 Olympics, scheduled to be held in Australia.

This week at Helsinki, Bob seemed to have no worries about either 1952 or 1956. Easy and relaxed, he pronounced himself "in better condition than I was two weeks ago, though I had a little trouble sleeping the first night because the sun never seems to set in this country." In his dark blue U.S. Olympic sweatshirt, he was working out at the pole-vault pit, with Rev. Bob Richards, voluble and intense, giving him a few tips on how to improve his vaulting form.

Back home in Tulare, the folks were following his every move. Said one admiring Tularean: "You know, we'd be just as proud sending Bob over to Helsinki even if he couldn't score a point. He's just a good American kid, and I think more Europeans should see a good American kid. We're mighty proud and loud about him." But no one in Tulare really thought that anything short of a broken arm could keep Bob Mathias from making them prouder still.

*These hagglings were mild in comparison to other how-de-dos of the past. Among the most notable: during the London games of 1908, staggering Italian Dorando Pietri was dragged across the finish line of the marathon by Britons wishful to see him beat the U.S.'s fast-closing Johnny Hayes. Dorando was helped to his feet four times in all, and Hayes, after an outraged American protest, was finally declared the winner. Afterwards, both turned "pro" and cashed in on the publicity with a marathon race at the old Madison Square Garden. Dorando won by 60 yards.

*Officially, no country "wins" the Olympic Games: there is no official team scoring system. The press has devised a quasi-official one, awarding points to the first six finishers on the basis: 10-5-4-3-2-1.

*In the pentathlon (five events), first introduced in 708 B.C., the best jumpers qualified for the spear throwing; the four best spear men qualified for the sprint; the three best sprinters threw the discus; the two finalists wrestled for the prize: a wreath of olive leaves. The Ancient Games, held every four years (an Olympiad) for nearly twelve centuries, first started near Athens in 776 B.C.

*During the 1912 Olympic prize presentation, Sweden's King Gustaf called Thorpe "the world's greatest athlete." Later, because it was found that Old Jim had played baseball for money, all his Olympic trophies and medals were taken away from him.

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