Raymond Ewry’s Olympic miracle
A polio sufferer as a child, US athlete Raymond Ewry defied the odds to win eight career Olympic gold medals, three of them at St Louis 1904.
Confined to a wheelchair after contracting polio at the age of seven, Ewry refused to believe that he would be paralysed for life and took up a physical therapy called plyometrics, exercising for 10 hours a day in an effort to regain use of his legs. He went on to become an outstanding athlete, representing Purdue University in Indiana in track and field and American football, and winning 15 US amateur track titles.
Having been selected for the US team at the Olympic Games Paris 1900, Ewry won the standing high jump, standing long jump and standing triple jump competitions, and successfully defended all three titles at St Louis 1904. When the standing triple jump was dropped from the Olympic programme at London 1908, Ewry won the other two competitions for a third time. All standing jump events were eventually removed from the programme after Stockholm 1912.
Ewry died in 1937, aged 63. He was among the first Olympic athletes to be inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame, in 1983.