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It was Saturday, the sixth of July, 1912, in the brand-new Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden. The hundred-metre heats were running all day: seventy men from twenty-two nations, a few at a time. In heat number sixteen, an eighteen-year-old American student crouched at the start. Ten point six seconds later, he had made history. But he did not know it yet.
Who was the fastest man in the world?
Before 1912 the honest answer was: nobody knew. Sprinters all over the world claimed amazing times. But who held the stopwatch? Was the track really a hundred metres long? Was it downhill? Was a strong wind blowing from behind? Some races were measured in yards, some in metres. There was no international body to check any of it.
So a time in one country could not really be compared with a time in another. And a world record that nobody can check is not much of a record at all.
A student from Philadelphia
The young man in heat sixteen was Donald Lippincott, born on the sixteenth of November, 1893, in Philadelphia. He was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and he had come to Sweden with the American team.
In his heat he ran the hundred metres in ten point six seconds. It was a new Olympic record. And because it was run at the Olympic Games, on a measured track, in front of official judges, it became the very first official world record in the hundred metres.
A new kind of clock
These Games were trying something new in timing, too. In athletics, an electric timer started by itself when the starter’s gun fired, and a judge stopped it at the finish. It was a first step towards the fully electric clocks we have today.
Eight false starts
The next day, Sunday the seventh of July, came the final. Six men were supposed to run, but Howard Drew, one of the favourites, had pulled a tendon in his semi-final and could not start. So five lined up. Then came the false starts. One. Two. Three. Eight in all.
In one of them, Lippincott and his teammate Ralph Craig did not hear the recall gun. They ran all the way to the finish line, a full hundred metres for nothing, and then had to walk back and start again. On the ninth start, the race finally went. Craig won in ten point eight. Alvah Meyer was second. Lippincott, the world record holder, was third.
A few days later, he ran the two hundred metres final and won silver, again just behind Craig. He went home with two Olympic medals, but no gold.
The rules are born
Something else happened in Stockholm that summer. On the eighteenth of July, just after the Games, representatives of seventeen national athletics federations met in the city and agreed to form an international body. It became the IAAF, known today as World Athletics. From then on there would be rules: how tracks were measured, how times were taken, how much wind was allowed, and who decided what counted as a world record.
In the official list of hundred-metre world records, Lippincott’s ten point six sits at the very top. Other men equalled it, and in 1921 Charley Paddock ran ten point four. Electric timing arrived, and hundredths of a second. In 2009, Usain Bolt ran nine point five eight. Every one of those records stands on the first line, written in Stockholm in 1912.
A quiet life
And Donald Lippincott? He went back to Philadelphia, graduated from the Wharton School in 1915 with a degree in economics, served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy in the First World War, and spent his working life in banking and finance. He was president of his university class of 1915 and helped set up an award in its name. He died in Philadelphia in 1963, at sixty-nine.
There is a quiet lesson here. Lippincott lost the final he most wanted to win, and still became the first name in the record book. Sometimes the most important thing we do is not the thing we win. Ask the older people in your family what they are proudest of. It is often not the trophy you expect.
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Sources: Wikipedia – Donald Lippincott; Wikipedia – Athletics at the 1912 Summer Olympics, Men’s 100 metres; Wikipedia – Men’s 100 metres world record progression; Wikipedia – World Athletics; Wikipedia – 1912 Summer Olympics. Pictures: Donald Lippincott, 1912, and the 1912 Olympic 100 m final (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.