Oda Mikio

Oda Mikio

Oda Mikio ( Japanese 織田 幹 雄 ; born March 30, 1905 in today's Kaita , Aki County , Hiroshima Prefecture ; † December 2, 1998 in Kamakura , Kanagawa Prefecture ) was a Japanese athlete and the first Olympic champion in an individual competition from an Asian country.

Athletic career

Oda first took part in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris . In the high jump he was just as unable to reach the final with 1.80 m as in the long jump with 6.83 m. In the triple jump he was sixth with 14.35 m.

At the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam he competed in four competitions. In the high jump he was seventh with 1.88 m. In the long jump he did not reach the final with 7.11 m. In the triple jump he won gold with 15.21 m, four centimeters ahead of second-placed American Levi Casey . In places 3 and 4 were with Vilho Tuulos and Chūhei Nambu, the Olympic champions of 1920 and 1932. At the end of the Games, Oda was eliminated with the Japanese 4-by-100-meter relay in the preliminary run.

In 1930 Oda became world champion student in the long jump. On October 27, 1931, he jumped the world record with a triple jump of 15.58 m. On the same day, Chūhei Nambu jumped a world record of 7.98 m in the long jump. These two world records were the first track and field world records set by Asians. At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932 , Oda was injured only 12th in the triple jump with 13.97 m, while Nambu won this competition.

In total, Oda set 21 Asian records in high jump, long jump, triple jump and decathlon and won seven titles at the Far Eastern Games .

Oda was 1.67 m tall and weighed 65 kg during his playing days. In 1988 he was named Bunka Kōrōsha, a person with special cultural merits .

Further career

Mikio Oda graduated from Waseda University and later became a professor himself there, after initially working as a sports journalist for the Asahi Shimbun . From 1952 to 1964 Oda was the coach of the Japanese Olympic team. He was Honorary President of the Japanese Athletics Federation JAAF, Council member of the World Athletics Federation IAAF and founding member of the ATFS statistics association. At the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 , the Olympic flag was hung in his honor at a height of 15.21 m.

In 2000, a ranking of Asian athletes of the 20th century was compiled by experts in Asian athletics within the ATFS. Oda was here in first place in front of Chūhei Nambu and the Taiwanese decathlete Yang Chuan-Kwang .

Top performances

• High jump: 1.92 m
• Long jump: 7.52 m
• Triple jump: 15.58 m

literature

• Manfred Holzhausen: world records and world record holder - triple jump / pole vault. Grevenbroich 2002
• Peter Matthews (Ed.): Athletics 1999. Surbiton, Surrey 1999, ISBN 1-899807-04-7 (contains an obituary)
• Ekkehard zur Megede: The Modern Olympic Century 1896–1996 Track and Fields Athletics. Berlin 1999, published by the German Society for Athletics Documentation eV

Web links

• Interview with Mikio Oda, first Japanese Olympic gold medalist ( Memento from May 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), article on the IAAF website about an interview from the Asahi Shinbun from 1998 that wastranslated into English(interview as PDF; 873 kB )
• Oda Mikio in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ City of Kaita: Honorary Citizen ( Memento of the original dated August 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Greetings from the mayor ( Memento of the original dated August 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Oda is the family name, Mikio the first name.