'Three Kings' book explores swimming at the 1924 Olympics
The book “Three Kings: Race, Class, and the Barrier-Breaking Rivals Who Redefined Sports and Launched the Modern Olympic Age” tells the story of three swimmers who overcame discrimination and hardships on their road to becoming superstars. The three met at the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924.
Todd Balf, the author of the book, joins host Deepa Fernandes for more on their amazing shared story.
Book excerpt: ‘Three Kings’
By Todd Balf
AS JOHNNY WEISSMULLER AND DUKE KAHANAMOKU’S qualifying events approached, the buzz intensified over who would prevail. The cartoonists had a field day. Feg Murray, a former swimmer and a Los Angeles–based illustrator who was friendly with both men,
sketched furiously throughout the spring, at one point posing the question, “Another job for Mr. Solomon: Weissmuller or Duke, which was it, how could anybody decide?” He imagined the two matched against each other on the golf course. Duke made a hole in one, Johnny did not. Another cartoon depicted their coaches, Fred Cady and Bill Bachrach, at loggerheads beneath a text bubble that read, “The greatest swimmer the world has ever known.”
Magazines and newspapers were obsessed with the swimmers’ physical numbers — their
height, reach, and chest size. Weissmuller had smaller feet: size ten and a half to Kahanamoku’s thirteen. The defending Olympic champ had larger hands, too. At nine-and-a- half inches long, they were bigger than a much taller man’s. Future high-flying dunkers like Wilt Chamberlain and Dr. J had similar sized hands but were seven-foot-one and six-seven, respectively. Kahanamoku was barely six-two. The fascination with Duke’s hands was such that an avid memorabilia collector considered a hastily drawn outline of them on lined notebook paper his most cherished Kahanamoku artifact.
Both Weissmuller and Kahanamoku shared the perfect body proportions of long upper
torsos and comparatively short legs, which made for less water resistance. Their wingspan,
commonly the same length as a person’s height, exceeded the average. Longer arms equated to longer distance per stroke. People were still not clear what truly governed speed — early crawl adoptees mistakenly emphasized a fast, windmilling stroke — but it eventually would be apparent that stroke length, along with stroke frequency, produced speed.
At the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the wellness guru John Harvey Kellogg
created a series of shadowgraph images of Weissmuller and proclaimed he had never seen a
more perfectly aligned body, with hips and shoulders on the same parallel line. On one image, taken in profile, Kellogg drew a head-to-toe vertical line and relational degree angles to show Weissmuller’s flawless posture, pelvic obliquity, chest ratio, and head tilt. God couldn’t possibly make a better example of a human being, he announced. As if to prove Kellogg’s point, an illustrator in Chicago drew Johnny as a heroic sculpture, like Michelangelo’s David.
Kellogg observed another trait that distinguished Weissmuller: a playfulness, a lightness
about him that he didn’t see in other test subjects who were elite athletes. “He takes his work as a skylark, he spoofs it, kids it, jokes with it,” said Kellogg. After one record-setting performance that Kellogg saw, Weissmuller celebrated by fooling around in the water like a sea otter for a delighted audience. At Battle Creek, he romped around the cavernous campus gymnasium playing indoor baseball, running bases and lunging for ground balls. “The capacity to be happy is perhaps an art, but any rate is a tonic, and no doubt in Johnny’s case it has a good deal to do with his success,” said Kellogg.
How fast the two swimmers could push each other was the question. It hit upon a larger
question that pervaded all human exploits, from running to flying to auto racing to mountain climbing: What was the limit of possibility? At that very moment, British alpinists George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were clawing their way up Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, despite the prevailing belief that no one could survive the upper reaches where life-sustaining oxygen was scarce.
Anything was possible in the record-setting age, and pools were where some of it happened. Twenty years earlier, before the crawl was universally adopted, the barrier to be broken was 100 yards in one minute. Weissmuller was threatening to break fifty seconds, slicing through water at a rate of speed akin to runners circling a park. Running and swimming were
interchangeable. Humans had been land animals but they were something else now.
In the early rounds of swimming, news wasn’t made by the Americans, Swedes, or Australians, all of whom advanced as expected, but by the Japanese and British. Both turned heads but for opposite reasons. The British, the original record setters of modern times, had faded faster than anyone thought likely. The Japanese had reversed their fortunes, having dramatically changed everything in a comparative heartbeat — their antiquated strokes and breathing techniques, their unshakable belief in the old ways. As they watched the Japanese during training sessions, British experts admitted they were impressed and predicted they would have to look out for them at the next Olympic Games in four years’ time. Instead the early results suggested something unthinkable: They had to look out right now.
The Aussies watched Weissmuller’s and Kahanamoku’s rival Katsuo Takaishi and saw
something unorthodox. One Australian reporter argued that his flutter kick couldn’t account for his speed, given he had small feet and hands “of which any woman would feel proud.” He was clearly double jointed, which was an advantage. The Australian newspapers would mix admiration with racist stereotypes when Takaishi visited the Commonwealth two years later. The White Australia policy had long barred immigration of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Swimmer Noel Ryan wrote in a coaching bulletin, “[the] Japanese crawl was aided by natural looseness and development of the thighs and ankles — probably made so strong and supple by centuries of squatting around the communal rice bowl.”
Japan’s charismatic coach Den Sugimoto was overwhelmed by the big favorites, at least at first. The American presence was powerful — their size, their numbers, and, as he observed, “their matching bathrobes with big American flags in the center.”
But as his team continued to log impressive times, Sugimoto’s confidence returned. Their
work and sacrifice and natural fighting spirit, the flowering of a group project they had collectively started, gave him faith, as did the crowd’s reaction to Takaishi in particular. His form was marvelous, his agility and flexibility evoking muscle and sinew rather than stiff skeletal framing. He didn’t require freakish hands the size of dinner plates and feet like fins. Takaishi, like many Japanese swimmers to follow, excelled in leg strength, footwork, intuitive feel through the water, and the mental fortitude of “overcoming oneself.” The fans threw their support behind the small outlier they couldn’t explain but couldn’t help but root for.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
