Tom Longboat

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Tom Longboat 1907

Thomas Charles Longboat (born June 4, 1887 in the Caledonia reservation or in the Six Nations reservation in Ohsweken near Brantford , Ontario ; † January 9, 1949 in the Six Nations reservation) was a long-distance runner.

Life

Tom Longboat was an Onondaga Indian whose Indian name was Cogwagee . He grew up with two sisters and his brother Simon on his mother's farm after losing his father at an early age. He attended the Brantford Indian School for five years.

His first coach was Bill Davis and he started his first official race, the Herald Road Race , on October 18, 1906, at the age of 19 . He completed the distance of 19 miles with 1:49:25 and won the race with a lead of three minutes over the nearest competitor.

Longboat also won his second race, the 15-mile Ward's Island Marathon, and on April 19, 1907, he won the Boston Marathon with a time of 2:24:24. With this he set a record that was not broken as long as this race was run on the old track.

Longboat took part in the London Olympics in 1908 . Here, however, he collapsed in the race on July 24th on the 20th mile. Also Dorando Pietri collapsed in this race. The suspicion that this incident was due to doping was raised, but could not be proven.

After this failure, he won another Ward Marathon and soon after, on December 15, 1908, won a competition with Pietri at Madison Square Garden . He fought against Alfred Shrubb in a marathon in New York in 1909.

On December 28, 1908, Tom Longboat married a Mohawk Indian, Lauretta Maracle.

At the time, he had the reputation of being the best distance runner in the world. Since 1907, after Harry Rosenthal, the Irish-born Tom Flanagan from Toronto had marketed it, but with whom differences arose after Longboat had switched from amateur to professional status. Now Flanagan sold his longboat contract to an American for $ 2,000, which shocked Longboat. But its price was falling rapidly now. The contract changed hands again a few months later for $ 700; Longboat's new manager was Sol Mintz. Longboat fought several spectacular fights with Shrubb and set a new record over 15 miles with 1:18:10 in 1912, but at the same time probably had personal problems: in 1911 he received a complaint for drunkenness.

After serving in the First World War from 1916 to 1918 in England and France - he was wounded twice - he was faced with unforeseen difficulties in Canada: his wife had married another man after he had been erroneously declared dead. Then Tom Longboat took a new wife, Martha Silversmith, who grew up on his home reservation. The marriage had four children.

But there wasn't much left of his money. Longboat took on various jobs, tried his hand at being a farmer for a while and eventually even sold his medals out of money. Finally he returned to Toronto, where he found employment as a city clerk with changing, little-regarded jobs, such as helping out on a garbage truck. In 1944 he retired to the Six Nations Reservation, where he died of pneumonia at the age of 62.

Tom Longboat is immortalized in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame and the Indian Hall of Fame .

Afterlife

  • The Canadian playwright Carol Bolt wrote the children's play Cyclone Jack in 1972 , which was about the life of Tom Longboat.
  • On June 4, 2018, on his 131st birthday, Longboat was honored with a Google Doodle .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.alfieshrubb.ca
  2. ↑ a b Archived copy ( memento of the original from August 19, 2009 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.histori.ca
  3. ↑ a b http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=history/other/native/longboat
  4. ↑ www.canadiantheatre.com
  5. ↑ Tom Longboat's 131st birthday. June 4, 2018, accessed on August 23, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Longboat, Tom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Longboat, Thomas Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian marathon runner
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Caledonia Reservation or Six Nations Reservation, Ohsweken near Brantford , Ontario
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1949
Place of death Six Nations Reservation