Ray Ewry

Ray Ewry
Ewry at the 1908 Olympics
Full name	Raymond Clarence Ewry
nation	United States
birthday	October 14, 1873
place of birth	Lafayette
size	185 cm
Weight	79 kg
date of death	September 29, 1937
Place of death	New York City
Career
discipline	Standing jumping
society	Purdue Boilermakers
Medal table
Olympic games 8 × 0 × 0 × Olympus. Interludes 2 × 0 × 0 ×
Olympic games gold Paris 1900 Standing vault gold Paris 1900 Stand long jump gold Paris 1900 Triple jump gold St. Louis 1904 Standing vault gold St. Louis 1904 Stand long jump gold St. Louis 1904 Triple jump gold London 1908 Standing vault gold London 1908 Stand long jump  Olympic Intermediate Games gold Athens 1906 Standing vault gold Athens 1906 Stand long jump

Raymond Clarence "Ray" Ewry (born October 14, 1873 in Lafayette , Indiana , † September 29, 1937 in New York City , New York ) was an American athlete who took part in four Olympic Games , 1900 in Paris , 1904 in St. Louis , 1906 at the unofficial games in Athens and 1908 in London . In total, he won ten gold medals at these games, which made him one of the most successful athletes in the modern Olympic Games.

Career

The extraordinary thing about his sporting career was that he developed polio as a child at the age of five and had to use a wheelchair for some time. After graduating from Purdue University with an engineering degree , where he played American football and athletics in various college teams , he went to New York and became a member of the New York Athletics Club.

He won all of his ten gold medals in the standing jumping competitions held only between 1900 and 1912 at the Olympic Games ( standing high jump , standing long jump and standing triple jump ). He was undisputedly the dominant athlete in these disciplines, and it was not without reason that he was nicknamed The Human Frog.

When he first participated in the Olympics, the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, he won all three disciplines, all of which were held on the same day (July 19). At the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, he was able to defend the title of Olympic champion in all three disciplines . The standing triple jump was taken out of the Olympic program after 1904, so that he could only defend his titles in standing high jump and standing long jump at the Olympic Games in London in 1908 . He achieved two more gold medals in the same disciplines at the Olympic Intermediate Games in Athens in 1906 , but the IOC does not count them as part of the official Olympic Games. These two medals therefore do not appear in the official statistics. He had won all the competitions that Ewry had competed in at the Olympic Games, earning ten gold medals. This makes him more successful than the American swimmer Mark Spitz or his compatriot, the athlete Carl Lewis (nine gold medals each). Officially, however, Ray Ewry is ranked tenth among the most successful Olympians of all time with eight gold medals (as of 2019).

His world record in the standing long jump of 3.476 m from 1904 lasted until 1938, from then on this competition was no longer held. In the period between 1898 and 1910 he won 15 AAU championships. In 1974 he was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and in 1983 into the US Olympic Hall of Fame .

Ewry at the standing vault in 1904

In old age, Ewry again suffered from a serious disease, bone tuberculosis . As a result of this illness, he eventually died of pneumonia .

See also

• List of the most successful summer Olympians

Web links

Commons : Ray Ewry  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ray Ewry in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bob Kriebel: 'Human frog' breaks records. (No longer available online.) In: jconline.com. August 2, 2011, formerly in the original ; Retrieved October 18, 2013 (English): "Later the long-legged, high-leaping Ewry tried basketball with fellow Purdue athletes on a team organized by the Lafayette YMCA before colleges embraced the new sport. And he played end on one Purdue football team before injuring a shoulder. "