Earlier this week, when the United States’ medal total for the 2024 Paris Olympics stood at five gold, 11 silver and 11 bronze, I did something I normally don’t do: look at the medal table.
Simone Biles doesn’t help the weightlifters win and LeBron James can’t score goals in women’s field hockey so I typically write it off as jingoism and change the channel back to actual competition.
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But when Regan Smith (from Lakeville, therefore “One of Us”) and Katharine Berkoff finished second and third in the women’s 100-meter backstroke on Tuesday, Team USA reached another ridiculous height: Between the Summer and Winter Games, Americans have combined for 3,000 Olympic medals.
That’s something to write home about, not to show off (though the next two countries combined, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, have fewer), but to tell a few stories along the way to 3,000.
The numbers are approximate, particularly early on, as not all competitions are sorted by date and none are sorted by exact time.
411. United States men’s ice hockey team, Antwerp 1920, silver
Yes, you’re reading this right. Though the Winter Olympics didn’t start until 1924 (Chamonix, France), organizers of the 1920 Summer Olympics in Belgium had an ice hockey tournament with seven teams, staged in late April (nearly four months before the rest of those Olympics took place).
They played on an 184-by-59 foot rink (an NHL rink is 200x85), seven on a side with no subs. Four of the 11 Americans were Minnesotans, with St. Paul’s Tony Conroy the team’s second-leading scorer. After losing 2-0 to Canada in the semifinals, the U.S. had a playoff with Czechoslovakia which they narrowly won by the score of 16-0.
602. Aileen Riggin, swimming, 100-meter backstroke, Paris 1924, bronze
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Riggin earned a complete set of Olympic medals, but this one was different.
Riggin won the 3-meter springboard diving gold as a 4-foot-8, 65-pound 14-year-old in 1920, and then came back and took a silver in the same event four years later. Just two days after that, Riggin proved she knew what to do when she got into the water.
Riggin, who swam competitively into her 90s and lived to 96, never saw her feat of winning medals in multiple sports in the same Olympics matched, but Ester Ledecka of Czechia won in Alpine skiing and snowboarding in 2018.
932. Harold Sakata, weightlifting, light-heavyweight, London 1948, silver
Sakata, born and raised in Hawaii, finished a distant second in the light-heavyweight class but went from there into professional wrestling, from which he was cast as the most infamous “henchman” in the James Bond franchise: “Oddjob.”
His best clean-and-jerk weight was 152.5 kilograms, or about 336 bowler hats.
1,391. John Clawson, men’s basketball, Mexico City 1968, gold
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Though the 1968 Olympic men’s basketball team might have been known for who wasn’t on it (Lew Alcindor didn’t come out, protesting racial injustice, and the likes of Pete Maravich, Wes Unseld and Bob Lanier were also off the squad), never mind that because WE HAVE A DULUTHIAN.
Sort of.
Clawson was born to Rev. Kenneth and Ruth Clawson in our fair city on May 15, 1944, though he went to high school in Naperville, Illinois and starred at the University of Michigan.
The U.S. went 9-0 and defeated Yugoslavia 65-50 for the gold medal, a game in which Clawson took one shot (he missed). The 6-foot-4 small forward scored 29 points in nine games.
1,580. Dennis Conner, sailing, Tempest class, Montreal 1976, bronze
Long before Conner became the first American skipper to lose, win back, and lose again, the America’s Cup, Conner piloted this two-man yacht on the only Olympic events ever staged on the Great Lakes (in Kingston, Ontario at the eastern edge of Lake Ontario). Seems like the other end of the Great Lakes might be an interesting location for an Olympic regatta some day.
1,665. Jeff Blatnick, Greco-Roman Wrestling, super heavyweight, Los Angeles 1984, gold
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No, the bridge between Duluth and Superior is not named after him (he was from upstate New York), but maybe it ought to be.
Blatnick was a Division II wrestler who was cheated out of the 1980 Olympics by the U.S. boycott. Before the next Olympiad Blatnick fought back Hodgkin’s lymphoma, losing his spleen and appendix, before winning an inspiring gold medal. Blatnick, who defeated cancer a second time soon after his triumph, went on to be a major force for standardizing safety and codifying rules in what became known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, even coining the term “mixed martial arts.”
1,784. Michael Carter, track and field, shot put, Los Angeles 1984, silver
Though Bob Hayes (100-meter dash, 1964) is the only person with a Super Bowl ring and a gold medal, Carter, who lost to Italian Alessandro Andrei by about 6 ½ inches, went on to win three Super Bowl rings as the nose tackle in the San Francisco 49ers 1980’s dynasty.
Oh, and Carter’s daughter Michelle won the women’s shot put in Rio in 2016 (that’s No. 2,734).
1,840: Dave Krmpotich, rowing, coxless four, Seoul 1988, silver
Duluth born and raised, Krmpotich starred in basketball at Cathedral High School and later UMD, but capped a rowing career hampered by the 1980 boycott and a badly timed illness before the 1984 Games by finally becoming a first-time Olympian at age 33.
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The Americans finished second to East Germany by 2 ½ seconds on a windy day, but Krmpotich remains perhaps the only athlete raised in Duluth to win a Summer Olympic medal.
Krmpotich was inducted into the UMD Hall of Fame in 2001 and the DECC Hall of Fame in 2008 and at last report, coached rowers at a Catholic high school in the Philadelphia area.
2,584: Ronda Rousey, judo, half-heavyweight, Beijing 2008, bronze
Rousey, who went on to make a name for herself in both mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, knocked off judokas from Turkmenistan and Poland before losing a quarterfinal to a Dutch athlete. She got past a Hungarian in the consolation bracket before defeating Annett Bohm of Germany in a bronze-medal match.
2,905: Kenny Bednarek, track and field, men’s 200-meter dash, Tokyo 2020, silver
“Kung Fu Kenny” is not exactly the flashiest or most outspoken American sprinter, but the Rice Lake, Wisconsin native was just six-hundredths of a second behind Canadian champion Andre DeGrasse in the 200 final in Tokyo.
He wasn’t even the only participant with a working knowledge of the NFC North: Fifth-place finisher Joseph Fahnbulleh, representing Liberia, was born and raised in Hopkins, Minnesota.
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We’ll find out if Bednarek can add his name to one of the next 3,000 medals during the track and field competition. Bednarek is qualified for the 100 (final on Sunday), 200 (Thursday) and 4x100-meter relay (Friday).
Brandon Veale is the sports editor of the Duluth News Tribune. He is writing columns throughout the 2024 Summer Olympics on Olympic history and issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
