Word: discus
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Mathias almost came a cropper in one of his specialties, the 110-meter hurdles. Winging off to a sprint start, Mathias knocked over three of the ten barriers, but still managed to beat his best previous decathlon time, 0:14.7, by a tenth of a second. He threw the discus nearly 158 ft., pole-vaulted 12 ft. 3 3/4 in. (9 inches under his best mark), made a prodigious javelin throw of nearly 194 ft., and wound up his two nights' work with a 4:55.3 clocking in the 1,500-meter...