Lewis Tewanima

Lewis Tewanima
Lewis Tewanima (1911)
nation	United States
birthday	1888
place of birth	Second Mesa ,  USA
size	160 cm
Weight	51 kg
date of death	18th January 1969
Place of death	Second Mesa, USA
Career
discipline	Long distance running
Best performance	10,000 m: 32: 06.6 min; Marathon: 2:52:42 h
society	Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Medal table
Olympic games 0 × 1 × 0 ×
Olympic games silver Stockholm 1912 10,000 m

Lewis Tewanima (also: Louis Tewanima ; * 1888 in Second Mesa ( Arizona ), USA ; † January 18, 1969 ibid) was an American long-distance runner who belonged to the Hopi Indian ethnic group .

It was a matter of course that Tewanima was already used as a teenager in the sheep breeding and agriculture of the Hopi Indians. When hunting prairie hares , his talent for running showed for the first time. As a boy, Tewanima ran the 60-  mile stretch from Second Mesa to Winslow to watch the legendary trains of the Santa Fe Railway from San Francisco to Chicago . In retrospect, he later said: "It was summer and the days were long."

In 1906, Tewanima was taken into custody by a cavalry regiment of the US Army when they took action on several Indian reservations against those residents who disregarded a legal regulation according to which Indians had to send their children to state schools. In 1907 Tewanima was admitted to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle , Pennsylvania . This institution had the task of conveying the social and legal foundations of the white American people to the Indian population.

At the same time in Carlisle employed coach for athletics and football , Glenn Warner , immediately discovered the running talent of Tewanima and took him to various competitions that were held among the various high schools and colleges . There was hardly a competition that Tewanima did not win.

For the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, eliminations competitions were held for the first time in the United States, the US Trials. Two events were counted for the marathon , but Tewanima did not take part. Thanks to Warner's advocacy, Lewis Tewanima was called to the team and set up for the marathon.

Lewis Tewanima in the 1908 Olympic marathon

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School team:
Tewanima sits on the far right, standing in the middle is Jim Thorpe

In London, the only 20-year-old Tewanima was given a teammate to set the right pace for the run. Joseph Forshaw accompanied Tewanima for the first 30 km until he finally realized that Tewanima seemed to be struggling with problems and could no longer keep the pace. Forshaw continued to run at a faster pace alone and eventually came third. He was later firmly convinced that he would have achieved the victory if he had left Tewanima a few kilometers earlier. Despite his problems, Tewanima fought his way to the finish and finished ninth.

Back in Carlisle, Tewanima and his schoolmate Jim Thorpe formed an almost unbeatable athletics team, so that the Carlisle Indian School almost always won in competitions against other schools, which often had 30 athletes and more.

In 1909, Tewanima was one of 46 world-class runners to compete in a ten- mile running competition at Madison Square Garden , New York City . Tewanima won with 54: 27.8 minutes, a time that no runner had ever run over this distance in the hall before.

Lewis Tewanima in the jersey of the US Olympic team in 1912

In 1911, The Evening Mail, a New York-based newspaper, hosted one of the first runs through the streets of New York, considered a forerunner to the city marathons and city runs that are very popular today. The run ran over 12 miles from the Bronx to City Hall and had 1,014 participants. According to newspaper reports from that time, around 1,000,000 spectators were present to cheer Lewis Tewanima on his winning run. Its running time was 1:09:16 h.

For the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912 , as in 1908, elimination competitions were held. Again Tewanima did not participate. Convinced of the running class of Tewanima, it was therefore decided without further ado to count the 1911 run in New York as a qualifying competition, so that Tewanima could be named to the US Olympic team as the winner of this competition. So Tewanima came to his second participation in the Olympic Games.

The 10,000-meter run was held for the first time at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, and the longest competition route in a stadium was the 5-mile run (8047 m). In addition to Lewis Tewanima, 29 other runners took part, of which the first five in each of three preliminary runs, i.e. a total of 15 runners, qualified for the final. As runner-up in the second heat, and with the second-best time of all runners, Tewanima had no problem running into the final, which was held a day later. Only eleven of the 15 qualified runners competed. Hannes Kolehmainen was in the lead from the start and ran towards an undisputed victory. The runners who tried to keep up with his pace later fell behind or gave up. Tewanima, on the other hand, relied on his own pace and was in second position halfway through the race, which he was also able to defend safely to the finish.

Numerous publications claim that Tewanima's time of 32: 06.6 minutes was an American record on this route that would have held for 52 years. This is incorrect. Although there was no official record list at that time for this route, which was rarely run in the USA, there is evidence that William Kramer ran a time of 31: 43.6 minutes one month before the Olympic final at the US eliminations. Kramer also competed in the 10,000 meter run in Stockholm, but gave up in the first run.

As in 1908, Tewanima also took part in the marathon in Stockholm. In very high temperatures, many runners had difficulties, Tewanima was one of them. Initially he held back, but from halfway through the 40.2 km long route he fought his way forward and was five kilometers from the finish in seventh position, almost eight minutes behind the leaders. After that, however, he had to pay tribute to his increased pace and the strenuous runs over 10,000 meters and fell back to 16th place.

The placements at the Olympic Games for Lewis Tewanima:

• IV. Olympic Games 1908, London
  • Marathon - ninth with 3: 09: 15.0 h (gold to John Hayes from the USA with 2: 55: 18.4 h)
• V. Olympic Games 1912, Stockholm
  • 10,000 m - silver with 32: 06.6 min (gold to Hannes Kolehmainen from Finland with 31: 20.8 min; bronze to Albin Stenroos from Sweden with 32: 21.8 min)
  • Marathon - 16th place with 2: 52: 41.4 h (gold to Ken McArthur from South Africa with 2: 36: 54.8 h)

Soon after returning to the US, Lewis Tewanima left sport and the big wide world behind, retired to Second Mesa and spent the rest of his life in his homeland as a priest of the Antelope clan, as a sheep farmer and as a fruit grower. He only left his home twice for a short time. In 1954 he boarded a plane for the first time in his life to fly to New York, where he received the honor for a call to the All Time US Olympic Track and Field Team appointed by the Helms Olympic Athletic Foundation . In 1957 he traveled to Phoenix to be inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame.

Lewis Tewanima died at the age of 80 when he lost his way on the way back from a religious ceremony due to his reduced visual acuity and fell down an almost 20 meter high cliff.

In 1972 Tewanima was posthumously inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame . Since 1974 the Hopi Reservation in Second Mesa has held the Louis Tewanima Footrace annually in memory of its famous brother. It is a cross-country run that leads 5 and 10 km across the Indian reservation.

Web links

• Lewis Tewanima in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )