Word: decathlon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...