Word: kingsburg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Negro got a brotherly buss from the loser and a tremendous roar of approval from the 30,000 fans, as he mounted the winner's platform in Moscow's Lenin Stadium and smilingly held a bouquet of flowers aloft in triumph. Rafer Lewis Johnson, 22, of Kingsburg, Calif, had treated appreciative Muscovites to one of the greatest individual performances in track and field history. He had amassed a world-record 8,302 points in the rugged decathlon*—:considered by many the toughest test of human endurance ever devised in sport. Russian men and women edged...
Back home in Kingsburg (pop. 23,000), Rafe's parents smiled happily when the local radio station interrupted a music program to announce his victory. But none of the town's inhabitants were very surprised. To the home-town folks, Johnson is a Samson, Paul Bunyan and Frank Merriwell rolled into one. His smoothly muscled build (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) casts him in the mold of Jim Thorpe and Bob Mathias, great Olympic decathlon champions of the past. In high school he captained the track, basketball and football teams, is still remembered as a good infielder...
...They may have been fickle, but the fans also were safe enough in their choice. For Rafe Johnson already held the world's record in the ten-event test that is an all-but-unrecognizable descendant of the pentathlon* of ancient Olympic times. In his home town of Kingsburg, Calif, last year, he ran up an astonishing total of 7,985 points, 98 more than Bob Mathias' winning Olympic performance in 1952, a fat 338 more than the best ever scored by his fast-improving prospective chief rival at Melbourne this fall, Russia's Vasiliy Kuznetsov...
Rafe went home to Kingsburg, tuned up by going out for every sport he could. He worked out no special training routine for the demanding decathlon, simply determined to spend four hours a day practicing whichever event suited his or his coach's fancy, a routine he still follows...