This summer, much of the attention has been held by the spectacle of athletic prowess in Paris for the Olympics, with household names like Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky further solidifying their already legendary statuses. Yet, contained inside all of this fanfare, there re-emerged the story of a little-known Olympic athlete from a century ago, throwing light on one of the most remarkable chapters in American sports history.
A former student of Johns Hopkins University, Louis Alfred Clarke, became an Olympic gold medalist in the 4×100 meters at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He was known as the “Johns Hopkins Speed Merchant” and the “100-yard hurricane.” Clarke’s journey to Olympic victory was nothing short of a great surprise and major legacy in this fable.
Clarke graduated with his degree in chemistry in 1922. He did not start running in earnest until the end of his sophomore year. An initial intention to play baseball, to prepare for a hopeful baseball career in his future, came from the student’s motivation when initially drawing the attention of his peers to his speed while running out bases which led to his first tryout for the track team. His natural ability to do well was very quickly revealed, and it took him so little time to set world records and gain entrance into the first-ever class of the JHU Athletic Hall of Fame.
His granddaughter, Dawna Clarke, remembered him being very quiet about what he had done. “I grew up knowing he was a gold medalist, but he was pretty humble about it all. He didn’t talk much about it,” she said. Later, she found a box of his medals up in the attic. All of his awards were stored away in a box except for his Olympic medal, which was framed and up on her parents’ wall.
The 1922 Hopkins yearbook entry on Clarke, whose rise as a track star was stupendous and improbable, said he was born in North Carolina, in the little town of Statesville, and did little shimmering in baseball before shinning in track with wins in the 100 and 220 in an inter-class meet. This type of accomplishment in track propelled him to narrow his focus in this direction.
In 1923, Clarke won the 100-yard dash an NCAA track meet 1923, and broke the tape for an indoor world record in 1924. That was good enough to earn him a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. He may have gotten food poisoning, but whatever the reason, he passed up the individual 100-meter event. Taking, in other words, the team had to have him. Taking him they did, and in Paris, they set two world records, going 41 seconds flat in the final to earn the gold.
He was not the only Hopkins athlete to medal that year. Verne Booth, a long-distance runner, took silver with the U.S. cross-country team.
Following his Olympic triumph, Clarke went on to work for Texaco as a chemist and earned many patents. He died in 1977 at the age of 75.
One hundred years later, with the torch burning again in Paris, Dawna Clarke will try to honor her grandfather, surrounded by other family members. “I think it’s just such a wonderful way to honor my grandfather,” she said. “We’re big fans of the Olympics and I’ve never been to one. That we can go a hundred years later and celebrate him is going to be a trip of a lifetime.”
Although the runners have gotten considerably faster since 1924, there remains an eternal quality in Louis Clarke’s feat. It stands as the perfect example of the universal appeal of the Olympic Games.