America’s Harrison Dillard only Olympian with 100, 110 metres hurdles Gold | Sunday Observer

America’s Harrison Dillard only Olympian with 100, 110 metres hurdles Gold

9 April, 2022
Harrison Dillard in action-The first photo finish in Olympic history as Dillard wins the 100 metres hurdles
Harrison Dillard in action-The first photo finish in Olympic history as Dillard wins the 100 metres hurdles

Harrison Dillard of the United States is the only male in the history of the Olympic Games to win gold medals in both the 100m and the 110m hurdles, making him the World’s Fastest Man in 1948 and the World’s Fastest Hurdler in 1952.

Harrison Dillard continues to remain the only male athlete to achieve the unique double in both the sprints and high hurdles. He is arguably one of the finest and all-time greatest sprinters and hurdlers in the United States Olympic history.

Dillard, known as “Bones” to both friend and foe, was a fierce competitor who loved both the competition and friendships that occurred throughout his track and field career. He is a four-time Olympic gold medalist, who was considered the world’s best hurdler in the 1940s.

Early life and career

William Harrison Dillard was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 8, 1923 and attended East Technical High School. When his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, honoured the great Jesse Owens upon his return from the 1936 Olympics, the 13-year Dillard was one of the spectators.

Known as “Bones” because of his tall, lean frame, Dillard entered Baldwin-Wallace College in 1941 and joined Pi Lambda Phi International Fraternity, and two years later was drafted into the United States Army serving in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

He returned to college in 1946 and resumed athletics, to which he had been inspired by Jesse Owens, who also had attended East Technical High School.He won the NCAA and AAU 120-yard and 220-yard hurdles in both 1946 and 1947 and tied world records in both events with a 22.3 in the 220 in 1946 and a 13.6 in the 120.

His hurdling career began with childhood ingenuity. “We kids used to take old car seats, burn the fabric off them and then jump over them in the street,” he said.Dillard and other neighborhood children were blessed to watcha parade honoring Owens for his Olympic triumphs.

As Dillard told it: “Jesse looked down from an open car and said, ‘Hi, boys.’ I ran home. I said, ‘Mama, Mama, I just saw Jesse Owens, and I’m going to be just like him.’ She said, ‘Of course you are, son.’ She didn’t take it seriously then, but later, when she saw how much it meant to me, she went out and cleaned other people’s houses and did their laundry and cooked for them so she could buy a little more food to build me up.”

Five years after Owens had graduated from East Technical High School in Cleveland, Dillard enrolled there. That year, Owens presented him with his first pair of running shoes. When Dillard failed to make the high school team as a sprinter, Owens urged him to become a hurdler.

After high school, came 32 months in the Army during the World War II. When the war had ended, Dillard ran in an Army track meet and won four events. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., a fascinated spectator, who had placed fifth in the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, called him “the best goddamn athlete I’ve ever seen.”

“The first time I came to New York to race,” he said, “everyone was asking, ‘What is a Baldwin-Wallace?’”It was a college with a track cage too small for hurdling, so he did most of his training outdoors. When the snow became too deep, he retreated to the women’s gymnasium, where there was barely room for a 15-yard start, one hurdle and then 15 yards to stop.

“Having only that one hurdle,” he said, “I learned to start fast and get there ahead of the big guys so their elbows wouldn’t bat me around.”He learned so well that he would eventually break 11 world and Olympic records. He once held all world hurdles record outdoors and indoors. He won more than 400 finals in the hurdles and sprints, including 14 United States championships.

Military Athlete

It’s worth remembering that Dillard, along with Charley Paddock and Mal Whitfield were among the Armed Services’ greatest Olympic champions in a long list of military and athletic greatness.

Paddock, who served in the U.S. Army Field Artillery in World War I, won two golds and two silvers in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. You might remember him as the cocky American in “Chariots of Fire.” He returned to the service during World War II and was killed in a 1943 military plane crash in Alaska. Whitfield, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, and Dillard won a combined nine medals at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, seven of them gold. Four of the golds belonged to Dillard; five to Whitfield. All three are in the U.S. Olympics and Paralympics Hall of Fame.

Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, humiliating German leader Adolf Hitler and his ideal of Aryan supremacy.

Dillard, about a decade younger than Owens, had been 9 when he had watched Owens, then a high school senior, run at East Technical High back home. He idolized Owens, vowing to grow up to be just like him.

Since the Olympics were cancelled due to World War II in 1940 and 1944, the 1948 Olympics were the first held since Owens had accomplished his feat. And so it was that the East Tech guys were, in consecutive Olympics, both dubbed the fastest men on the planet.

Dillard graduated from East Technical, then went to Baldwin Wallace University) on a track scholarship. During his sophomore year, he was drafted and later assigned to the 92nd.

By 1944, he was in combat in Italy. For six months, the 92nd slowly advanced, liberating towns as they went. Dillard recalled mortar fire, minefields, the bravery of his comrades. He also remembered Italian civilians, their villages destroyed, begging U.S. servicemen for food.

With the end of the war, Dillard’s focus turned from survival to running. He would go on to being one of the greatest sprinters and hurdlers of his generation.“I grew up physically in the service but more than that it teaches you self-reliance and discipline,” he said in his Veterans History Project interview. “Military discipline is second to none.”

He was the best athlete a lot of people ever saw. At the London Games, he won gold medals in 100-meter dash and the 4x100 relay. Four years later, at the Helsinki Games, he won the 110-meter hurdles and another 4x100 relay - making him a four-time Olympic gold medalist, just like his idol, Owens.

He returned to his hometown and spent the rest of his life there, well-known but not an icon. He spent most of his career as a manager in the business department of the Cleveland Board of Education, eventually retiring as department head in 1993. Fame never followed him very far, and he certainly never followed it.

When a reporter from ‘The Undefeated’ visited him in 2016 for a story before the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, his Olympic medals were stored in a closet and there were no glory-days pictures or memorabilia on display. He was 93, and he didn’t consider himself a hero, but still saw Owens as one.

“He performed his athletic feat in circumstances where they were important, by throwing the lie of Aryan supremacy right in Hitler’s face and in his house,” he told. For himself, he said, his athletic achievements didn’t carry the same symbolism, and, at the end of the day, he didn’t think running fast was all that important in the scheme of things.

Grit and resilience are among the qualities that make Olympic athletes great — many overcome formidable challenges just to reach the games. It’s even more difficult to survive the rigors of military service and combat to arrive at the medals podium.

“I was extremely proud” of being a Buffalo Soldier, he said in a 2008 interview with the Library’s Veterans History Project.

1948 and 1952 Olympic Games

In the 1948 US Olympic trials, Dillard finished third in the 100-meter final and made the Olympic team. The next day, in the 110-meter hurdles trials, his foot hit four of the first seven hurdles, and his rhythm was destroyed. He stopped running before the eighth hurdle.

Thus, after winning a then world-record 82 straight hurdles races, Dillard failed to make the 1948 US Olympic team as a hurdler.“I was supposed to be a shoo-in,” he said, “but I learned that day that nothing’s ever a sure thing. It was the worst race I ever ran. It was the only time in my life than I didn’t finish a race.”

In the final of the 100-meter dash at the London Olympics that year, he was expected to finish no higher than fifth. Instead, he won, leading his college coach, Eddie Finnegan, to say: “Fate is strange and wonderful. I’m going out to find a church somewhere.”

All eyes were on the first Summer Olympic Games taking place since 1936. After years of war, countries from around the world meet not on the battlefield, but on the track, in the swimming pool, inside the boxing ring. At Wembley Stadium in London, six sprinters crouch on the track for the finals of the 100-meter dash. The gun sounds and in 10.3 seconds it’s over.

The race is so close that a photograph is used to declare the winner.The image is striking. Six of the world’s fastest men, caught seemingly in mid-flight, none of their feet are touching the ground, are frozen in a furious burst of speed. They seem to be out-running their own shadows. It’s appearing to be as much a ballet as it is a sprint.

But the photo makes it clear: William Harrison Dillard, at the bottom of the image, won the gold and takes the honorary title of the “Fastest Man Alive.” His arms and hands are flung out and up, palms open, his right leg bent backwards at the knee, the toes of that foot pointing straight toward the heavens.

Fellow American Barney Ewell who initially celebrated with arms raised, thinking he had won took the silver. Panama’s Lloyd LaBeach edged the U.K.’s Alastair McCorquodale for the bronze.Dillard had won, equalling the world record of 10.3 sec. This was the first use of a ‘Photo Finish’ at an Olympic Games. As a member of the 4x100m relay team, he won another gold at the London Games.

Dillard’s feat was all the more stirring because, three years earlier, he had not been sprinting at a university or track club, but dodging mortar fire in Italy as part of the U.S. Army’s 92nd Infantry Division, a segregated unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Four years later, still a strong hurdler, Dillard did qualify for the hurdles and won the gold medal in his signature event, the 110-meter-high hurdles by narrowly beating American Jack Davis.Another 4x100m relay victory yielded his fourth Olympic title.

Dillard attempted to qualify for a third Olympics in 1956, but failed finishing seventh in the trials. Earlier, he won the gold in the 110m hurdles at the 1953 Maccabiah Games. His total of four gold medals equaled the four in 1936 by Jesse Owens, his hometown hero in Cleveland.

Legacy

Dillard was ranked among the best in the world in both the 100m/100y sprint and 110m/120y sprint hurdle events from 1947 to 1953, according to the votes of the experts of Track and Field News.

Dillard worked for the Cleveland Indians baseball franchise in scouting and public relations capacities, and hosted a radio talk show on Cleveland’s WERE. He also worked for the Cleveland City School District for many years as its Business Manager.

He retired in 1993 after working 26 years for the Cleveland Board of Education, mostly as business director. He was a track adviser and spokesman for Mobil, which sponsored the United States outdoor and indoor championships, and once served as a spring training coach for the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, teaching baseball players how to run.

Dillard became the only athlete ever to win Olympic gold medals in a sprint and a hurdle event. Without any doubt, he was the best hurdler of his time, winning 82 consecutive races, May 31, 1947, through June 26, 1948, the streak was the longest in track and field history until broken by Ed Moses.

Dillard was virtually unbeatable indoors, mainly because of how well he came out of the blocks. He won the AAU indoors 60-yard hurdle event seven years in a row, 1947 through 1953, and again in 1955. He was also the outdoor 110-meter-high hurdle champion in 1952.

Dillard posted three world records during his track career: 120y hurdles in 13.6 at Lawrence at the Kansas Relays on April 17, 1948;220y hurdles (straight course) in 22.5 at Delaware on June 8, 1946;220y hurdles (straight course) in 22.3 in Salt Lake City on June 21, 1947.

He also ran the world best times twice but were not ratified by the IAAF: 220y hurdles (turn) of 23.0 in Minneapolis on June 22, 1946; 220y hurdles (straight course) of 22.5 in Berea, Ohio on May 20, 1947.

His Personal Best performances: 100m in 10.50 (1948); 200m in 20.8 (1948); 110m Hurdles in 13.6 (1948); 400m Hurdles in 53.7 (1942).His Olympic Games record: At London 1948, gold medal in 100m at 10.3 and gold medal in 4x100 m relay in 40.6; At Helsinki 1952, 110m hurdles in 13.9 and gold medal in 4x100m relay in 40.1.

Dillard enjoyed being a role model.“I have always felt that you present yourself in public as one to be respected and remembered,” he said, “someone people can say about, ‘Here is a human being, a great guy.’”

His Statue stand at Baldwin Wallace University in his memory whilst the Track at Baldwin Wallace is named the Harrison Dillard Track. The United States National Track and Field ‘Hall of Fame’ inductee in 1974 (the inaugural year) and IAAF ‘Hall of Fame’ inductee in 2013.A world record holder in both the high and low hurdles, he was a member of 14 world and American ‘Halls of Fame.’

Dillard died in Cleveland, Ohio on November 15, 2019, at the age of 96 of stomach cancer. At the time of his death, he was the United States’ oldest living Olympic gold medalist. His wife, Joy, died in 2009. He is survived by a daughter, Terri, and three grandchildren.

(The author is an Associate Professor, International Scholar, winner of Presidential Awards and multiple National Accolades for Academic pursuits. He possesses a PhD, MPhil and double MSc. His email is [email protected])

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