During the next two and a half weeks, three native Utahns - marathoner Ed Eyestone of Ogden, archer Denise Parker of South Jordan and 800-meter runner Julie Jenkins of Plain City - will chase Olympic championships in Barcelona, Spain. Theirs is no easy quest. In the history of the modern Olympiads only one Utahn has worn the olive wreath as Olympic champion - and even when Alma Richards won the high jump in 1912, he wasn't supposed to.
It might not be a bad idea if Eyestone, Parker and Jenkins took time to review Richards' story while en route to Spain. If an eighth grade dropout from Parowan, Utah, can beat Jim Thorpe, win the gold medal, and get an invitation to the King's palace for dinner, then why not them, too?Alma Richards was a cowboy before he became a high jumper. Born in 1890 in the southern Utah farming town of Parowan, he quit school after the eighth grade to ride his horse, work the range and chase jackrabbits. He returned to school only after a chance meeting with a college professor from Michigan State University named Thomas Trueblood. They met one rainy night in a railroad shelter in the southern Utah outpost of Lund, Utah, and the professor so inspired Alma with his tales of travel and opportunity, all made possible, he said, by the miracle of education, that Richards, at the age of 19, rode straight to the Murdock Academy in Beaver, Utah, and signed up for the ninth grade.
When Alma Richards said eighth grade was the best five years of his life, he wasn't kidding.
In no time at all, Prof. Trueblood became a prophet. Returning to school wound up sending Richards places all right. It all started the spring of his ninth grade year when the coaches at the Murdock Academy, who had duly noted that Alma was nearly 6-feet-4 inches tall and 220 pounds, inquired as to whether he might like to come out for the track team.
To this stage in his life, Richards had never even seen a track. But he did as he was asked and, three months later, showed up at the state high school track championships in Salt Lake City wearing the livery of the Murdock Academy. At the meet, held at the old Cummings Field on the University of Utah campus, he proceeded to score enough points all by himself to win the state title for Murdock. Salt Lake High School, the biggest school in the state and a perennial track & field bully, was relegated to second place (32 points to 22) and its team members stood slack-jawed as Richards and the rest of the Southern Utahns left for Beaver, the championship trophy in hand.
The next year, Richards enrolled for 10th grade at Brigham Young High School in Provo (In those days, Brigham Young was a combined high school and university). At BYU, Richards came to the attention of E.L. "Timpanogos" Roberts, the track coach, and it was Roberts who, after watching Alma clear a high jump bar set at 5-foot-11 while wearing his basketball uniform, encouraged him to think about competing in the Olympic Games.
Richards also knew nothing of the Olympics. For one thing, the modern Games had only been under way for four Olympiads - since their resumption in Greece in 1896 - and for another thing, no one in Parowan had heard of them.
Through the winter, Roberts and Richards worked on the intricacies of the high jump - which, in those days, mandated a scissors style, with the feet preceding the head over the bar. By springtime, Roberts put Richards on a train bound for the Olympic Trials in Chicago, where he got off the train, put on his high jump shoes, and won the competition at a height of 6-foot-3.
The country's track & field officials were as astounded as Salt Lake High had been. At first they denied Richards a spot on the team, citing the "fluke" factor. (Politics then, as now, ran rampant in track & field and there were other, better connected high jumpers who received deference). But to Richards' rescue came Amos Alonzo Stagg, the renowned football and track coach at Chicago University, who happened to be there when Richards made his jump. Stagg, also a member of the Olympic selection committee, said Richards might drawl a little, and say "harse" instead of "horse," but he knew one thing, he was no fluke.
To save face, they put the cowboy from Utah on the U.S. team as a "supplemental member" and placed him aboard the USS United States, bound for the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.
What happened in due course in Stockholm's Olympic Stadium is a matter of official Olympic record. Out of a starting field of 57, six high jump finalists eventually emerged. Besides Richards they included world record holder George Horine of Stanford University (he had jumped 6-foot-7 just months earlier), Hans Liesche (the German champion and, next to Horine, the odds-on favorite), and three more Americans - H.J. Grumpelt, E.R. Erickson and one Jim Thorpe (who would win the pentathlon and decathlon in Stockholm and become known far and wide as "The World's Greatest Athlete").
For these six, the bar was moved to 6 feet, 2 inches.
Horine and Liesche cleared it on one try. Grumpelt, Erickson and even the great Thorpe failed, failed and failed again and were eliminated. Richards failed once, failed twice, and then, adjusting the floppy felt cap he wore, cleared the bar on his third and final try.
He had clinched a medal.
Now the question was which color.
In his memoirs, Richards wrote that of all the people who thought he had no chance against the world's two most noted high jumpers . . . he was one of them.
But he continued to jump anyway, and at the next height of 191 centimeters, or 6 feet, 3 inches, a Dan O'Brien happened: Horine didn't make it.
That left Richards and the German as the bar went up to 6 feet, 4 inches.
When you're on a roll you're on a roll, and Richards was on a roll. Almost before they placed the bar on the standards, he, jumping first, strode down the runway and cleared the height.
Liesche's only chance was to quickly follow suit with a clean first jump.
He didn't. His second and third jumps showed the strain. He bumped the bar both times.
King Gustav of Sweden personally handed Richards his gold medal. He also placed the champion's olive wreath on his head, and, since his son, Gustav Adolf, the prince, was an aspiring high jumper himself, invited him over to the palace for dinner later that week.
Richards returned home in triumph, was showered in a ticker tape parade in New York City, showered by yet another parade when he got off the train in Provo, and given a college scholarship by Cornell, where he became the national collegiate high jump champion. He later won the national AAU decathlon in San Francisco (exceeding Jim Thorpe's Stockholm totals) and would have been the Olympic decathlon favorite in 1916 if World War I hadn't interferred. As it was, he was the most-decorated athlete at the combined Armed Forces track & field championships in Paris in 1919, as a 29-year-old.
Eighty years have come and gone since Richards put Utah on the Olympic gold medal map in 1912. Enough time for a second act. Like Richards, the 1992 Utah Olympians - Eyestone, Parker and Jenkins - aren't going to the Games as household names or as favorites. But as Richards clearly showed, that doesn't mean you have to leave that way, too.