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Back in the stadium on friday, the day of the marathon, the Americans were cleaning up. Burke won the 100-meter dash, ensuring that the next four years would be known as the Olympiad of Thomas Burke, of Boston. The king presented him with his first place silver medals at the awards ceremonies the following Wednesday. As befitted the winner of the 100-meter race, he became the first athlete since the fourth century a.d. to receive an olive branch from the sacred groves at Olympia.

Thomas Curtis, who had dropped out of the 100-meter final to save his strength for the 110-meter high hurdles, beat a boastful Englishman named Goulding to the resounding cheers of his teammates. Ellery Clark

Gentleman marksman John B. Paine and his brother, Sumner, won convincingly at Athens in the revolver events. John, above, was evidently still in top form when he shot this first-place target at a match in Paris just a month after the games.

easily won the high jump, while Garrett took second. Connolly was right behind him. In the pole vault, Hoyt of the B.A.A. and Tyler of Princeton battled it out. The Greek vaulters, once eliminated from the contest, kindly massaged the Americans' arms and legs, and provided them with hot drinks to fortify them against the increasing cold. Hoyt nearly lost the contest when he couldn't clear the penultimate height, but succeeded on his third attempt and went on to win the silver medal with a vault of 10 feet 9 3/4 inches.

Then the Greeks won the marathon, and their goodwill knew no limits. (The B.A.A.'s Blake collapsed after 19 miles.) Over the course of the games, a warmth had arisen between the Americans and their Greek hosts. Partly it was the result of the Greeks' gracious behavior in the face of sweeping American victories. Partly it was their fascination with the Americans' barbaric cheers, with their strange habit of buttock-slapping, and their general enthusiastic support for any good effort. The fact that the Americans appended the phrase "Zito Hellas!" (Long live Greece) to their cheers of "B.A.A.! Rah! Rah! Rah!'' a few days into the games didn't hurt either. Clark actually sewed the arms of the Greek royal family above the American flag on his jersey. Twice the king called spontaneously for an American cheer, once in the stadium, and once at a royal breakfast he was hosting.

There were feasts, parties, and picnics throughout the games in honor of the athletes. No group was more fêted than the American team. They dined with Admiral Selfridge on the U.S.S. San Francisco, which had been decorated with thousands of colored lights for the games. They were guests at the country home of Madame Schliemann, widow of the famous archaeologist, and at one picnic demonstrated the messy fundamentals of baseball to the Greek princes with a stick and an orange.

In all, Americans won nine of the 12 silver medals in track and field, inaugurating a record of domination in those events that has continued ever since. Of the team's 11 silver medals overall in 1896, Harvardians past, present, and future (including Burke) captured eight.

Olympic historians sometimes note that the winning performances at the 1896 games were not outstanding in comparison to other records of that period. In their defense, the Olympians of 1896 competed in cold weather on a very soft, new cinder track after 17 days of travel, with no time for recuperation; all this on the heels of a New England winter. Nor were their competitors of the highest quality. But the caliber of these athletes is not in question. Connolly set a world triple-jump record that stood for 13 years in the year after the games. Clark won the 1897 American all-around championship

Burke, prize-laden, with King George I's chargé d'affaires, who expressed the royal wish to hear more American cheers.

(equivalent to the modern decathlon) with performances that would have won him the 1896 Olympic high jump, long jump, and shot put, and probably the 100-meter dash and the 110-meter hurdles as well. Hoyt went on to set the Harvard and intercollegiate records in the pole vault in 1898. Burke was an international quarter-mile champion.

On their return to the United States, the olympians were greeted with wild enthusiasm. Politicians couldn't get close enough to the laurel-crowned heroes. The mayor of Boston, the governor of Massachusetts, and the B.A.A. honored them with banquets. Connolly, having elected to stay in Europe, was not there. Neither were the Paine brothers: Sumner returned to work in Paris while John traveled in Italy with his parents. Hoyt, on his return, somewhat naively asked Harvard to let him make up his hygiene course "as my health is now restored." He seemed unaware that his Olympic exploits had been widely reported and celebrated in America. A few days later he withdrew the request, but managed to get into the medical school that fall.

Connolly's rise as an American Olympic folk hero after the 1896 games makes a fascinating yarn. He frequently tailored the story of his Harvard experiences to his audience. Sometimes he cast himself as a man of principle who had left Harvard in righteous indignation; at other times, he would say he had been "tossed out." Modern variants of this story have appeared in books and magazines in this Olympic centennial year. One tells how Connolly applied to Harvard for leave to go to the Olympics (he actually said nothing about the Olympics); how he stayed up celebrating all night before his triple-jump victory (he actually slept for several hours); and how Harvard, with great humility, eventually tried to patch things up by offering him an honorary degree, which he declined on principle (actually, Harvard never offered Connolly an honorary degree, but the Harvard athletic committee did confer on him a major honorary "H," or varsity letter, which he stonily accepted at his fiftieth reunion).

Of the ancient Olympic champions, the classical poet Pindar wrote, "He who overcometh hath because of the games a sweet tranquility throughout his life forevermore." This prophecy did not survive the 1896 revival. Arriving home early from the Boston armory one evening in 1901, Sumner Paine surprised his wife with his daughter's Dutch music teacher, the latter in a state of partial undress. Paine chased the flying Dutchman (as the newspapers soon dubbed him) out of the house, firing four bullets from the .32 caliber pistol he habitually carried. Though briefly jailed and charged with assault, the expert marksman was released when police determined that he had shown restraint, for he could easily have dispatched the interloper had he so desired. Connolly, for his part, harbored throughout his life proprietary feelings about the fact that he had been the first modern Olympic victor. In July 1932, more than three decades after the games, he accused former teammate Ellery Clark in the pages of the Boston Transcript of not giving him his due as the first winner, and of stealing his story about not being able to mark his run at the 1896 games. Connolly had been telling the story on the lecture circuit and said Clark was making him look like a liar. An astounded

Madame Schliemann hosted this gathering of eminent persons at Daphni Monastery outside Athens. Connolly, at left, is leaning toward young Prince Andrew, father of Queen Elizabeth's husband, Philip. Marathon winner Spiridon Loues, in traditional costume, sits cross-legged in the front row, while the stadium architect reclines with his cane and bowler hat.

Clark defended himself in the next day's paper, pointing out that he had in fact given Connolly credit for being the first modern victor (he had), and pointing out that the same incident that had happened to him in the long jump (Princeton's Garrett would later corroborate Clark's memory) probably had also happened to Connolly in the triple jump.

Several weeks later, following a train of convoluted illogic, Connolly stopped just short of accusing Clark of cheating in the long jump by secretly marking (in front of thousands of people) his third run. Garrett concluded that "Connolly has, in modern phraseology, gone 'ga-ga.'" Clark attributed the outburst to the summer "heat, or if not the heat, the humidity." What really bothered Connolly, it transpired, was Clark's (probably erroneous) description of the American flag being raised after Curtis's win in the 100-meter trials. The raising of that flag was Connolly's moment of glory, a moment he had often recreated before spellbound audiences, and he thought Clark had deliberately stolen it from him. The spirit of competition had spilled off the field.

Arthur Blake shared his somewhat fonder memories of the 1896 games in the Transcript of July 27, 1932. He recalled cooking a big steak with Coach Graham on the evening prior to the marathon. They were at an inn in the country, he said, when a "tremendous fellow came in with a six-foot gun over his shoulder, a goat's-skin hat, and whiskery face." Blake asked the landlord what the man did with the gun. "He shoot game, wild animals, and other men," responded the landlord. "I understood then why the American ambassador had given us Colt .45s when we arrived," Blake said. Of the race itself, he remembered running 19 miles without mishap, "but the next thing I knew I was jolting along in the bottom of a wagon... All my training around Corey Hill had been in vain, and that was a perilous thing in 1896, because several times women in Brookline tried to have me arrested for running in shorts through the residential section."

Even though Blake didn't finish the 1896 marathon at Athens, the race began a great tradition: the B.A.A. has staged its annual Boston Marathon ever since. Harvard, for its part, has produced 136 summer and winter Olympians since the 1896 games, including 22 medalists. That's not bad for an Ivy League college, whatever President Eliot might have thought.

Jonathan Shaw '89 is an associate editor of this magazine.

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