Bob Mathias

Bob Mathias wore many hats: Olympic champion, U.S. congressman, and actor. Competing for the United States, he captured gold in the decathlon at both the 1948 London Games and the 1952 Helsinki Games. A Republican, he represented California’s 18th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives for four consecutive terms, from 1967 to 1975. Born in Tulare, California, on November 17, 1930, Mathias had partial Greek ancestry. At Tulare Union High School, his track coach, Virgil Jackson, suggested he try the decathlon in early 1948.

That summer, right after graduating, he made the U.S. Olympic team for the London Games. His inexperience showed there: he nearly fouled in the shot put because he didn’t know the rules, and he almost failed in the high jump. But strong performances in the pole vault and javelin pushed him past France’s Ignace Heinrich for the gold. At age 17, he became the youngest gold medalist in a track and field event.

Between the two Olympics, Mathias kept winning decathlons. In 1948, he received the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. Because his high school grades didn’t match his athletic feats, he spent a year at The Kiski School, a Pennsylvania boarding school, before entering Stanford University in 1949. There, he played college football for two seasons and joined Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.

He set his first decathlon world record in 1950 and helped Stanford reach the 1952 Rose Bowl—the first nationally televised college football game. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Mathias dominated. He won the decathlon by a staggering 912 points, setting a new world record, and became the first person ever to defend an Olympic decathlon title. His winning total of 7,887 points stood as Stanford’s school record for 63 years, until freshman Harrison Williams broke it in 2015.

That same year, Mathias became the first athlete to compete in both an Olympics and a Rose Bowl. After Helsinki, he retired from competition. After earning a BA in education from Stanford in 1953, Mathias served two and a half years in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to captain and receiving an honorable discharge. He later became the first director of the U.S. Olympic Training Center, a role he held from 1977 to 1983.