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Alma Richards’s Olympic Leap of Faith Revisited
Alma Richards’s Olympic Leap of Faith Revisited
By LARRY R. GERLACH
It is doubtful that Alma Richards or any other 1912 Olympian appreciated the historic significance of the Stockholm Games. The modern Olympics had begun only sixteen years before in Athens, Greece, and the subsequent three games—Paris 1900, St. Louis 1904, and London 1908—had been plagued by poor participation, organizational problems, and competitive controversies. Stockholm was the first to exhibit the attendance, facilities, and administrative efficiency envisioned for the Olympics, as well as numerous “firsts” that heralded the future success of the Games. 1 The V Olympiad also witnessed the finest athletic performances to that point. One of the most remarkable performances came from Alma Richards of Parowan, Utah, who set an Olympic record when he won the gold medal in the high jump.
Alma Richards at the high jump competition in Stockholm, July 1912. Here, he displays the determination that would produce the gold medal. He is wearing the official USA team uniform; note the optional leggings.
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Richards’s epic story has been described as “equal parts Rocky, The Natural, and Chariots of Fire.” 2 The description is apt: with a stunning upset in the high jump, the unheralded Richards became the first Utahn ever to win an Olympic gold medal and the only native of the Beehive State to do so in the twentieth century. During the next twenty years he was recognized as the most accomplished all-around track and field athlete of his generation, earning national championships and records in five different events. One of the finest athletes in Utah history, his national and local honorific awards included election as a charter member of the Utah Sports Hall of Fame and to the Brigham Young University Hall of Fame; additionally, the Parowan High School athletic stadium bears his name. But throughout his life, the surprising Olympic triumph fundamentally defined his public and personal persona. Richards’s gold medal leap in Stockholm was one of those rare instances in sports when mind and muscle so meshed as to produce an extraordinary physical feat. Or was it?
Alma Wilford Richards was born on February 20, 1890, in rural Parowan, Utah, into a devout Mormon family of pioneer ancestry. 3 His father, Morgan Richards Jr., managed the town Cooperative Mercantile and held several civil and ecclesiastical offices, among them selectman, superintendent of schools, and bishop of the Parowan First Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ninth of ten children, Alma was in a sense the chosen one, the only child given a name of religious significance: “Alma” for the Nephite prophet whose founding of the Church of Jesus Christ in the ancient Americas is in the Book of Mormon and “Wilford” in honor of the modern prophet, Wilford Woodruff, who had married Alma’s parents in 1870 and who was then serving as the fourth president of the LDS church.
As was common for boys in rural communities, “Pat,” as he was familiarly known, left school after the eighth grade in 1904 to become a “cowboy.” Then Richards met Thomas C. Trueblood, a professor of elocution and oratory at the University of Michigan, during a snowstorm in December 1908. The chance meeting inspired the nineteen-year-old Richards to pursue a high school education, and so, in January 1909, he enrolled at the Murdock Academy near Beaver, Utah. The strapping freshman was considerably older and physically more mature than the other students, and he immediately caught the eye of coaches, who convinced him to go out for track. Despite a lack of familiarity with the sport and a lack of training—there was no high school in Parowan--he proved to be a natural athlete.
On July 12, 1912, two days before the U.S. Olympic team sailed for Sweden, the track and field athletes participated in a fundraising exhibition at Hilltop Park. Richards (fifth from the left) was one of the athletes who assembled along the center field fence for a group photograph. He wore the Illinois Athletic Club uniform in which he had competed in the Evanston team trials.
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With a physique ill-suited for sprints or distance running, Richards concentrated on field events, not as a specialist but as a participant in multiple contests. In 1910 he led tiny Murdock to the state championship, scoring half the team's points and being named the meet's outstanding performer after setting state records in the high jump and shot put while finishing second in the broad jump and pole vault. he then transferred to Brigham Young high School in Provo, where, thanks to the lack of standard eligibility rules, he was for the next two years the star performer on the university's varsity team. There, Richards displayed a remarkable versatility and competed in all the field events--the high jump, shot put, broad jump, pole vault, and discus.
On May 31, 1912, only three years after being introduced to the sport of high jump, Richards boarded a train for his first trip out of the Beehive State. He was headed to Evanston, Illinois, to participate in the central regional trials for a place on the U.S. Olympic team. He had intended to compete in the broad jump and high jump during the trials, but decided to focus on the high jump. During the pre-meet training, it quickly became evident that Richards possessed not only exceptional physical ability, but also supreme confidence, despite his inexperience in top-flight competition. One of the coaches, Boyd Comstock, recalled how Richards arrogantly dismissed his competitors in the trials—“None of them are any good”— and vowed to win “here first and then [at] the Olympics.” 4
On June 8, Alma Richards made good on his first boast, winning the high jump with a leap of 6-feet 3-inches, the highest he had ever jumped. Thinking the surprising victory by a virtually unknown competitor was a fluke, the meet director, Everett C. Brown of the Chicago Athletic Club, tried unsuccessfully to replace the newcomer on the team with a collegiate champion, Earl Palmer of Dartmouth College. 5 But the next day, Richards boarded a train headed for New York City, there to join the other members of the U.S. Olympic team. How the objections to Richards’s place on the team were resolved is uncertain, but it is clear that he joined the squad as a regular member, not as a supplemental choice, as has been suggested. On June 14, with his newly issued first passport in hand, Pat from Parowan boarded the SS Finland and embarked on a life-changing experience.
Richards was proud of his accomplishment and thrilled by the oceanic voyage, but his teammates did not take him “seriously on the trip to Sweden.” His demeanor led some of them to call him a “boob,” “rube,” and “chump” behind his back. Others found him “quite gullible” and played good-natured practical “country boob jokes” on him. He tended to keep to himself, prompting James Sullivan, secretary of the American Olympic Committee, to comment, “Well, Richards, I would not have known you were on the boat if I had not heard some of the fellows talking about you. You seem to be the quietest man with the bunch.” While not given to social interaction with teammates, Richards was confident, even boastful, about his ability. He told Wesley Oler, a fellow high jumper from Yale University, “I do know that I’ll win the high jump.” 6 In truth, he later recalled that at the beginning of the voyage to Stockholm, it “looked to me as if I was taking a 12,000 mile trip just for the pleasure of sightseeing and gaining a few points that I wish to use in the future as a coach.” 7
Indeed, observers gave Richards little chance of winning a medal in Stockholm, despite his win at the central trials. He knew that Mike Murphy, the head American trainer and a track coach at the University of Pennsylvania, and his teammates “thought that I was a good second rater” and “expected some of the other fellows to make a better showing.” They downgraded Richards’s potential less because of his inexperience in top-flight competition and more because of his physical stature and technique. As Murphy observed, Richards’s “huge frame”—six-feet, twoinches tall and 210 pounds—made high jumping the event for which he was “the least fitted naturally.” 8 And instead of the customary scissors technique, Richards used an utterly unorthodox style: he approached the bar straight-on, like a broad jumper, leaped with his body erect, and tucked his knees against his chest to clear the bar. The coaches agreed that he was “about as awkward looking an athlete as [was] ever seen.” 9
The qualifying round of the 1912 Olympic high jump competition took place on July 7. The nine-man American contingent included the world-record holder, George Horine of Stanford University, and Carlisle’s Jim Thorpe, who would win both the decathlon and pentathlon; the team was heavily favored to win all three medals. At the end of the first round, six Americans ranked among the eleven finalists—including the “Mormon giant.” 10
In the final round on July 8, one month to the day since the Olympic trials in Evanston, the contenders steadily dropped out. When Horine, the pre-meet favorite, failed at a 1.89 meters jump, two long-shots—Hans Liesche, the German champion, and Alma Richards—unexpectedly found themselves competing for the gold medal. Liesche looked the winner as he had sailed over the first twelve heights “with wonderful litheness” on the first attempt, then cleared both the 1.89 and 1.91 meter marks with “the greatest confidence” on his second jump. Richards, who admitted he “had much difficulty that day,” needed all three tries to surpass the 1.83, 1.87, and 1.89 bars. He again failed twice at 1.91, but on his third and final attempt, when “everybody looked for a win for Germany,” he “lifted his heavy body with enormous power across the bar.” 11 The bar was now raised to the Olympic-record height of 1.93 meters, or six feet and four inches.
Richards wanted Liesche to jump first, but the German deferred, as was his right for having had fewer misses. In contrast to his earlier struggles, Richards surprised everyone by sprinting without hesitation to the pit and clearing the bar “with a couple of inches to spare.” 12 Liesche now appeared unnerved, whether by the effortlessness of Richards’s exceptional leap or by his unsportsmanlike effort at “getting his goat” by walking back and forth several times in front of the pit between the posts. Although the bar was set only three-quarters of an inch above a height Liesche had cleared easily, he failed twice to match the Olympic record. Then, as he began the run-up to his third and final attempt, he was interrupted three times—by a starter’s gun for the 800-meter final, by a band that started to play unexpectedly, and a by Swedish official who pointedly urged Liesche to “hurry up.” Utterly frustrated, his concentration gone, Hans Leische missed badly on his last jump. 13 With another stunning upset, the unheralded, unorthodox, but supremely confident country lad, who previously had “but a vague idea of the importance of such an event,” became the premier high jumper in the world. 14
Richards, jumping at a spring 1911 track meet at Brigham Young University. This image features his good-luck hat and, most notably, the markedly unorthodox jumping style that would amaze coaches and commentators throughout his career.
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Richards received a hero’s welcome upon returning to Utah and went on to forge a career unlike anything he had imagined as a boy in Parowan. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, received a law degree from the University of Southern California, and taught science in Los Angeles high schools from 1922 to 1953. For twenty years after the Olympics, Richards competed in championship track and field competitions. He set national records in the indoor and outdoor high jump, broad jump, and decathlon; won a national title in shot put; and won regional championships in the high jump, broad jump and fifty-six-pound weight events. After retiring from competition in 1932, the Beehive State’s greatest athlete slowly slipped into historical oblivion, known only as the name of an Olympic champion to a few sports enthusiasts. And then, Richards’s achievements were resurrected, largely because of the purported circumstances of his dramatic gold medal leap. Shortly after Richards’s death in May 1963, Hack Miller, the sports editor of the LDS-owned and operated Deseret News, received an article that a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper had presumably published. The article came to Miller from James Alva Banks of Manti, Utah, who was then serving an LDS proselytizing mission in Milwaukee. The article appeared in the Deseret News on May 18, as follows:
Initially not much was made of Richards’s reported prayer, even in LDS circles. T. Earl Pardoe, a BYU drama professor turned Alumni Association–historian, included Richards in his compilations of famous BYU personalities and LDS athletes without mentioning prayer. William Black’s Mormon Athletes simply excerpted the Deseret News article without comment. And a Brigham Young University graduate student’s theatrical script about Mormons who achieved excellence in a variety of endeavors discussed Richards, but without reference to prayer. 16 But as interest in the Olympics increased with Salt Lake City’s efforts to host the Winter Games, sport and religion merged in Utah in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the midst of these efforts, two Salt Lake City sports writers published a compendium about LDS athletes intended for LDS readers, Trials and Triumphs: Mormons in the Olympic Games. 17 Lee Benson and Doug Robinson made Alma Richards the subject of their lead chapter, and several Deseret News and BYU alumni magazine articles subsequently retold and embellished his story. 18 His celebrity grew, in part, because Salt Lake City’s Olympics quest coincided with the LDS church’s initiative to project more Christian and “mainstream” images—an effort aided by the national visibility of Brigham Young University’s athletic programs, notably football, and the prominence of professional LDS athletes such as Steve Young, Danny Ainge, Johnny Miller, and Dale Murphy. 19 The story of Richards’s medal-winning prayer meshed neatly with America’s obsession with sport and with the church’s public relations efforts.
The Salt Lake Organizing Committee inexplicably failed to include Parowan on the initial Olympic torch relay route through Utah. Widespread protest ensued, and on February 5, 2002, a brief ceremony to celebrate the state’s first Olympic champion took place in front of Richards’s boyhood home.
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Consequently, LDS officials, strong supporters of Salt Lake City’s bid, embraced Richards and his story of faith and piety in order to establish a faith-promoting Mormon Olympic identity.
David Lunt has admirably described how the LDS church packaged an Olympic trinity—Richards, the double-gold-medal gymnast Peter Vidmar (1984), and the steeplechaser Henry Marsh (1976, 1984, and 1988)— as exemplars of Mormonism. These Olympians offered an inspirational message of faith and piety for Latter-day Saints—and for those outside the religion—by personifying how traditional LDS beliefs, teachings, and practices led to success in sport and, presumably, in other endeavors. 20 Church leaders had long praised Mormon athletes for faithfully illustrating the power of adherence to the Word of Wisdom (the LDS health code), but Alma added an important dimension to the affirmation of belief. 21 Vidmar and Marsh bore their personal witnesses before church groups, but the retelling of Richards’s story was more compelling because it represented an overt, public expression of religiosity by “a devout believer who prayed for God’s help—and received it.” 22
Richards had previously been known as a champion track athlete whose religious significance came in his observation of the church’s dietary proscriptions; he now had become a venerated LDS role model and highly publicized Olympic icon. Several years prior to the 2002 Winter Games, his image had appeared on billboards throughout the Salt Lake Valley, and on February 4, 2002, the torch relay (after an embarrassing oversight that necessitated rerouting) passed through his home town. 23 More conspicuously for Mormons, he was the principal Olympian depicted in the LDS church’s cultural contribution to the 2002 Olympics, Light of the World: A Celebration of Life, a drama, dance, and music extravaganza that performed for sold-out audiences in the 21,000-seat LDS Conference Center during the Games in February 2002.
Light of the World used Richards’s life story, with liberties, to illustrate Mormon pioneer history, the Olympics, and notions of universal brotherhood through the production’s main theme: the “light of Christ” had inspired courage and achievement and had enabled the boy from Parowan to find his way. In the final scene, Richards, who has drifted from his Mormon heritage, kneels below a projected photograph of his gold-medal leap and prays to God for support. The narrator explains the message: “The light in Alma Richards and in all of us is not the light of victory alone. It is the light by which we find our path and follow it to the end.” 24 Richard Kimball has succinctly summarized the larger issue that, “Whether it was 1912 or 2002, recreation and athletics remained viable ways for the church to inculcate values and model proper social behavior.” 25 And, one might add, connect Mormons with the broader Christian community. Alma Richards had become a preeminent representative of Mormonism because of an event that may or may not have happened.
Today it is commonplace for athletes to signify faith by making the Sign of the Cross, inscribing scripture references on eye shadow, kneeling prayerfully in end zones, or pointing heavenward after a notable achievement. But such overt religious expressions did not often occur in sport in predominately Christian America in 1912 and much less so in an international athletic arena such as the Olympics. The most infamous example of Olympics-related religiosity involved Forrest Smithson, a theology student from Oregon State University who in 1908 won the 110-meter hurdles in a world-record time. The Official Report of the London Games contains a picture of Smithson carrying a Bible in one hand during the race. It is bogus. The picture was staged to challenge the scheduling of any Olympic event on the Christian Sabbath. Smithson’s event occurred on a Saturday, not a Sunday, and no contemporary newspaper, observer, or official mentioned his dramatic protest of toting the Good Book while running. Further, another photograph of Smithson’s race shows him running emptyhanded. 26 Smithson was a fake; Richards was not.
It was perhaps inevitable in a religious culture given to premonition and discussion of God’s revealed favor that Richards’s extraordinary athletic achievement would become part of the folklore. Because his public display of religiosity seemed so remarkable, in the course of researching a biography of Richards, I sought more information about this compelling, inspirational, and most unusual supplication for God’s favor. Immediately, two questions required resolution. The first was provenance. A search of Milwaukee newspapers, the supposed source of the 1963 Deseret News article, yielded no results. Neither the Sentinel nor the Journal, the two major Milwaukee newspapers, published anything about Richards at the time of the Olympics in 1912 or his death in 1963. Then, while researching his intercollegiate career at Cornell, I found the likely “mother” article in the New York Evening Mail of February 3, 1914. It appeared under the byline “Francis,” the pen name of Frank Albertanti (who was also known as Max Francis), a flamboyant sports columnist who specialized in the coverage of prize fights. The germane portions of the article are as follows:
Hack Miller apparently had assumed that the material Alma Banks sent him came from a Milwaukee newspaper, when in fact Banks had sent along a copy of Albertani’s article from the New York Evening Mail. Miller—as was his wont—excerpted substantially from the piece and rewrote portions of it. Further, Miller apparently did not know Les Goates, his predecessor, had previously obtained a copy of the Evening Mail article and published excerpts of it in the Deseret News. 28
Second, I had to resolve the issue of accuracy. Albertani, who accompanied the American team to Stockholm, was seemingly an authoritative source. Yet serious questions exist about his story’s validity. Written eighteen months after the fact, the article contains numerous errors, fabrications, and manufactured verbatim conversations supposedly heard aboard the Finland and after Richards’s winning jump. 29 Albertani’s most egregious mistake was his reference to a devout Mormon crossing himself in prayer. (Perhaps the sportswriter, a Catholic, deliberately used “crossing” in referring to another faith instead of “blessing himself,” the correct Catholic terminology.) It is also curious that though Albertani purportedly wrote the column in anticipation of Richards inaugurating the indoor track season in Boston on February 7, he apparently did not know that the Cornell athlete’s next scheduled competition would take place in New York City’s Madison Square Garden four days later.
On July 6, a parade of 2,047 athletes entered Stockholm’s new Olympiastadion for the ceremonial beginning of the 1912 Olympics. Opening ceremonies were not yet major media and spectator events; only 13,653 witnessed King Gustav V declare the opening of what would be the largest and most successful Games to date.
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Factual errors and journalistic license aside, the major problem with the article is its singularity. Such a conspicuous public expression of devotion would have been a remarkable occurrence, but not one contemporary American or European newspaper (including the Evening Mail), U.S. teammate or official, or any other Olympic participant alluded to
Richards’s alleged act of praying on bended knee. George Horine, who supposedly teared up while cheering for Richards, never mentioned the incident in his reports from Stockholm for the San Francisco Call. In his detailed account of the high jump event, James Sullivan wrote of Richard’s winning leap, “We all thought he would take a great deal of time and care, making the usual measurements carefully. To our surprise, he disdained all preparations, skipped up to the bar with an easy run, and hopped over it with a full two inches to spare.” 30
An analysis of the Evening Mail account of Richards’s inspired leap raises five fundamental questions. Why would Albertani write about Richards’s public prayer if it did not happen? Did the journalist craft a stirring, human-interest tale of Olympian religiosity to attract readership? Why did an account from an on-the-scene reporter contain so many errors? If Richards did kneel openly in prayer, why did no other reporter or competitor—or anyone else, for that matter—discuss it? And, most significantly, why did Richards himself make no mention of prayer?
The day after winning the gold medal, Richards telegraphed the man responsible for launching his athletic career and his Olympic ambitions, the BYU track coach Eugene Roberts. He did not refer to prayer in his description of the winning jump:
A more revealing fact was that, upon returning to Provo, the LDS athlete who had attended and competed for BYU—his church-owned institution —failed to include an act of religious piety and devotion when explaining his gold-medal jump to a welcoming and overwhelmingly Mormon audience. Richards said only that when the bar was placed at six feet, four inches, he “experienced a momentary feeling of discouragement and doubt and felt the shadow of a chill down his spine.” Then, he continued, “I thought of the B.Y.U., Utah and my friends there, and the old United States and made the spurt—and chill and all went over the bar in the first attempt.” 32 Richards’s BYU high school yearbook provided a similar description of his leap: “The honor of his country, his state, and his Alma Mater were in his custody and visions of this responsibility for a moment numbed him. Then, after warming up slightly, he summoned his powers, and reinforcing them with a liberal portion of that old, determined, B.Y.U. spirit, he jumped.” 33 He repeated the account several times, and in interviews with Utah newspapers, including the Deseret News, never mentioned prayer. He simply stated, “As it happened the good jumpers did not do as well as they had formerly and through some power new to me I was able to do better. I squeezed out the winner.” 34
Richards surely knew about the story of his Olympic prayer while he attended Cornell. The Ithaca Daily News reprinted Albertani’s article about the school’s famous track star on February 4, 1914, but neither Richards nor the school publications made any reference to it. During the next twenty years of Richards’s collegiate and amateur track competition, his contemporaries, as well as the sports reporters who covered his lengthy career did not mention a Stockholm prayer. Neither did the dear friend who delivered his funeral eulogy or the LDS elders who conducted his memorial services in California and in Utah. 35
This is not surprising. After all, neither Richards nor the press had mentioned the prayer in 1912. And while he remained true to the faith of his fathers throughout his adult life, with the passage of time, his religiosity probably became more a matter of personal conviction than institutionalized practice. Baptized as was customary at age eight, Richards did not serve a proselytizing church mission or receive temple endowments—two important commitments of faith in an LDS life. His church attendance waned and likely ceased for a time, as his first two wives, Marion Gardner and Anita Gertrude Huntimer, were not LDS; further, he did not raise any of his four children as Mormons. His third wife, Lenore Griffin, whom he married in 1948, was an active Latter-day Saint, but their marriage was not solemnized in an LDS temple.
Whatever the extent of his religious practice, Richards earnestly embraced his Mormon heritage. Although he lived in Los Angeles from 1922 until his death in 1963, he remained a Parowan boy at heart. He subscribed to the Parowan Times, returned frequently to Utah to visit family and friends, contributed to church-sponsored charitable activities, and enthusiastically supported the preservation of the pioneer-era Old Rock Church, where, he wrote, “many of us were taught that it was wrong to steal, lie, smoke and drink and these teachings have been followed by many who otherwise would not have been so true.” 36 Then, thirty years after the fact, came Richards’s first intimation of an Olympic prayer. The Improvement Era, the official LDS news magazine for various church organizations, printed excerpts from “letters recently received” from Richards in a November 1942 piece entitled “Alma Richards—His Record and Testimony.” After briefly summarizing his athletic career, the Era quoted Richards as having said, “I told the Lord . . . that if He would help me to win the high jumps in the Olympic Games at Stockholm, I would do my best to be a good boy and set a good example.” Whether this entreaty occurred before Stockholm, sometime during the Games, or at the actual competition is unclear. However, the main point of the article was not Richards’s vague, imploring comments about prayer, but rather, his reiteration of his refusal to accept a thousand dollars from “a large tobacco concern” to endorse its products after he won the gold medal. “It was no temptation whatever,” he declared. “Many times I had needed money badly—yet not that much.” 37 His firm rejection of the offer in 1912 was well known and had earned him, like other outstanding Mormon athletes, praise for personifying the relationship between athletic success and adherence to the church’s dietary teachings at a time when the Word of Wisdom was evolving from preference to principle. A 1928 Improvement Era article, for instance, extolled Richards for his athletic achievements and noted that he had remarked, “I have never used regularly tea, coffee, tobacco, or liquor in any form. I still believe in the Word of Wisdom.” 38
Accordingly, the Improvement Era featured Richards’s 1942 comments in its “No-Liquor-Tobacco Column.” The editor began the column by reminding the chairmen of local LDS committees of their charge to get at least one hundred Latter-day Saints to urge their U.S. senators and representatives to support a bill sponsored by Texas senator Morris Sheppard, the so-called father of Prohibition. Sheppard’s bill would have banned the sale, gift, or possession of alcoholic beverages where American military personnel lived, worked, or trained. Within this context, the Era column concluded by praising Richards not for offering a prayer during the Olympics, but rather for serving as an exemplary representative of Mormonism: “Alma Richards is a modest, thoroughly honest man who attributes his athletic successes and moral strength to parental teachings, keeping the Word of Wisdom, and prayer. He has always believed that liquor and tobacco are not good for man—a truth revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1833. Alma Richards has set an example of moral courage, fidelity to parental teachings, and faithfulness in keeping the commandment of the Lord, worthy of imitation by every boy in the Church.” 39
Why did Richards mention his Olympic prayer for the first time thirty years after the Games? Could the emotional impact of a second divorce (one involving three preteen children) have prompted Richards to rededicate himself to his faith? In August 1942, he wrote a letter amounting to a testimony of beliefs to Joseph F. Merrill, a member of the Council of the Twelve, who in 1930 had authorized a church loan for Richards. Merrill, knowing the Olympic champion’s firm endorsement of the Word of Wisdom would inspire the faithful and bolster the church’s support of the Sheppard temperance bill, forwarded the letter to the Improvement Era for publication. Whatever the circumstances, Richards’s celebrity gave added importance to his affirmation of the LDS faith. The Deseret News understood as much, reprinting the column with the same title two months later. 40
Twelve years later, Richards renewed contact with his old Olympic rival, Hans Liesche, through the assistance of the German sportswriter Arthur E. Grix. 41 Richards had been deeply troubled since 1912 with doubts about his Olympic victory, frequently saying that Liesche was “the best jumper in the world” and noting that repeated interruptions had upset the German as he attempted a final leap. In his first letter to Liesche in February 1954, Richards recalled the high jumping competition in detail, forthrightly declaring, “I have always felt that you should have won the 1912 High Jump” because “you were interrupted a great deal.” He subsequently repeated the statement, always citing the distractions Liesche endured, but without discussion of prayer. 42 Nor did Richards mention prayer in an autobiographical statement he sent to Grix, who was preparing a magazine article on the reuniting of the two aging Olympians. If Richards had knelt openly in prayer during the competition—an act that would have been widely observed—why did he not mention it to Liesche, who surely would have known about it, or to Grix, who would have liked to have known about it for his article?
But then, in October 1954, Alma wrote a statement assessing his life, in which he again referred to prayer in conjunction with the gold medal. He reiterated the comments he made after the Games and in the Improvement Era article, with slight embellishment and a major addition: “Many thoughts went very rapidly through my mind. I thought of Parowan—my folks—the B.Y.U.—Utah—my people—that I was representing our Country against a fine athlete from another country. I felt weak and as if the whole world was on my shoulders. As I walked back to make my jump, I said a prayer and asked God to give me strength and if it was right that I should win—that I would do my best to set a good example all the days of my life. The weight went off my shoulders and my confidence returned.” 43 By writing that he had prayed privately while walking back to prepare to approach the bar, Richards effectively countered the idea that he had knelt in open supplication. 44
Is it coincidence that Richards again mentioned prayer—this time with specific reference to the 1912 Olympics—in an introspective, private document he penned seven months after having resumed contact with Liesche? Did referring to prayer help alleviate his long-standing uneasiness, now heightened by correspondence with Leische, about a triumph that, however exceptional, remained troubling because of extenuating circumstances? Could invoking prayer, in whatever form, justify a seemingly miraculous achievement that seemed inexplicable, save for divine intervention?
It is uncertain how—or even whether—Alma Richards prayed before his victorious Olympic leap. No contemporary sources discussed a prayer; and, upon his return from Stockholm, Richards himself did not refer to prayer before overwhelmingly LDS audiences or in interviews with Provo and Salt Lake City newspapers that, given the religiosity of much of their readership, surely would have reported such a demonstration of faith. During the next thirty years of collegiate and amateur track competition, Richards was widely heralded as an Olympic champion, but none of his fellow competitors or newspaper reporters apparently knew of his purported prayer. The teacher who wrote a lengthy ode for Richards’s retirement, the friend who delivered his eulogy, and the Latter-day Saints who conducted his memorial services did not hint at the Olympic prayer. Richards himself did not bring up prayer in the Olympic-oriented autobiography he prepared for Arthur Grix or in his correspondence with Hans Liesche from 1954 to 1963. And no evidence exists that his widow—whose determined efforts to preserve Richards’s Olympic memory resulted in the transfer of his athletic awards from the Helms Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles to BYU—mentioned prayer in Stockholm. In short, the only direct evidence of an Olympic prayer are two brief, vague statements Richards made thirty and forty-two years after the fact.
If Richards did pray before his final leap in Stockholm, certain conclusions seem evident. First, he apparently placed no particular significance on it at the time since he did not cite the effects of a prayer while explaining his achievement to fellow church members and to the press after returning from the Olympics. He may have felt prayer was a purely a private matter, but the failure to share with coreligionists apparent evidence of God’s favor countered the customary practice of Mormons to bear faith-promoting witness. Second, he most assuredly did not ostentatiously kneel in prayer— a practice atypical for Mormons—but instead offered a private, brief, and silent entreaty, similar to the sort of supplications that would later become common among athletes during competitions.
Ultimately, the question of Alma Richards’s Olympic prayer relates to the larger issue of the use of sport as an instrument of social assimilation and the reinforcing of faith. This is nothing new. Church-affiliated educational institutions from Notre Dame to Brigham Young have sponsored athletic teams for this purpose since the late nineteenth century. The Alma Richards story is unusual in that it involves a religious institution, the LDS church, officially using an individual athlete’s specific expression of faith to inspire the flock, to project a “mainstream” image of cultural respectability, and to indirectly support Salt Lake City’s bid to obtain the Winter Olympics. There is nothing untoward in any of that.
What is troublesome is how stories of Richards’s alleged prayer were constructed, even exaggerated, so that the faith-related purpose took precedent over factual accuracy. No attempt was made to ascertain the veracity of the story, in whole or in part. And despite a compelling 2007 article in which David Lund questioned the account of Richards’s public prayer, the story continued to be repeated uncritically and with embellishments; prior to the 2012 London Summer Games, for instance, the Deseret News credited Richards with having set a world record, instead of an Olympic record. 45
Does it matter? Well, yes. Extraordinary professions of religiosity and overt examples of God’s favor provide a potent means of reinforcing and transmitting faith; given the folkloric status such tales command, it seems imperative to ensure their accuracy. Personal testimonies of spiritual experiences, borne by Latter-day Saints, form a vital part of Mormonism; observers may consider such testimonies to be experiential perceptions or to be contrived parables—in other words, expressions of belief intended to bolster religiosity. However, statements about historical figures—which might be taken as gospel truths that have withstood the test of time— should be faithful to history, not faithful history. While faith-promoting history is not solely an LDS issue, attributing religiosity to Richards’s gold medal performance not only attached a defining quality to one of Utah’s finest athletes, it also positioned him as an exemplar for all those who seek evidence of divine intervention in mundane events. The uncritical acceptance of a questionable account about an undocumented Olympic prayer created a distorted, if not false, representation of Alma Richards and his historic achievement. It is only certain that phenomenal leg strength and indomitable determination propelled him over the bar; more than that need not be said. Alma Richards deserves a place in the pantheon of great Utah, Mormon, and American athletes for the same reasons that brought him fame before it was fashionable to emphasize a questionable instance of public devotion—he was Utah’s first Olympic gold medalist, he adhered to his religion’s dietary proscriptions, and he became the most versatile and accomplished track and field athlete of his generation.
Larry R. Gerlach is professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah. His recently completed biography of Alma Richards combines his interest in Olympic and Utah history.
NOTES
1 See Erik Bergvall, ed., The Fifth Olympiad: The Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912 (Stockholm: Swedish Olympic Committee, 1912); James E. Sullivan, ed., The Olympic Games: Stockholm 1912 (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1912); Horst Ueberhorst, “Stockholm 1912,” in John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 41–46; “The Olympic Games,” The Outlook, July 27, 1912, 655–56; Will T. Irwin, “The Olympic Games,” Colliers, August 10, 1912, 8–10, 26.
2 Lee Benson, “Alma,” BYU Magazine, August 1996, 38.
3 See Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A Compilation of Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1901), 3:499–500; Luella Adams Dalton, comp., History of Iron County Mission and Parowan, the Mother Town (n.p, 1973), passim.
4 Deseret Evening News, May 31, 1912; Salt Lake Tribune, June 1, 1912; Boyd Comstock, “The Man from Utah,” Sporting Life, April 1923, 19, 35, 38. Comstock was in town with three athletes from Citrus Union High School in Azusa, California, to participate in a national preparation meet.
5 Provo Post, June 11, 1912; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 1912; Deseret Evening News, August 24, 1912; Alma Richards, Personal Statement, October 14, 1954, box 1, fd. 14, Alma Richards Papers, 1919–1972 , L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter Richards Papers).
6 New York Evening Mail, February 3, 1914.
7 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 25, 1912.
8 Provo Post, August 25, 1913; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 18, 20, 25, 1912; Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1912.
9 New York Times, June 13, 1912; New York Evening Mail, June 13, 1912; New York World, June 13, 1912; New York Herald, June 13, 1912; Iron County Record (Cedar City, UT), July 5, 1912; Salt Lake Herald- Republican, August 20, 1912.
10 Edward Lyell Fox, “Our Olympic Flyers,” Outing Magazine, July 1912, 387–89; Richard Hymans, “The History of the United States Olympic Trials—Track and Field,” USA Track and Field, accessed December 9, 2013, http://www.usatf.org/statistics/champions/OlympicTrials/HistoryOfThe- OlympicTrials.pdf, 47; New York Times, April 30, 1912; Milwaukee Sentinel, August 11, 1912; Richards, Personal Statement, Richards Papers; Salt Lake Tribune, July 9, 1912. Due to the lingering effects of pink eye, when he was not jumping, Richards wore a ragged old hat to shade his eyes.
11 Bergvall, Fifth Olympiad, 393–94.
12 Ibid.; David Wallechinsky, comp.,The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Athens 2004 Edition (Wilmington, DE: Sport Media Publishing, 2004), 343; Arthur E. Grix, “The Olympic-days in Stockholm,” box 1, fd. 12, Richards Papers.
13 Sullivan, Olympic Games: Stockholm, 392–93; Bergvall, Stockholm 1912: Official Report, 393–394; David Wallechinsky, comp., The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Athens 2004 Edition (Wilmington, Delaware: Sport Media Publishing, 2004), 343; Grix, “The Olympic-days in Stockholm,” Richards Papers.
14 Provo Herald and Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1912; Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20 and 25, 1912.
15 Deseret News, May 18, 1963.
16 T. Earl Pardoe, The Sons of Brigham (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1969), 449–52; William T. Black, Mormon Athletes (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1980), 6–10; Kris Marele Morgan, “Mormon Montage: Mormons in the World: A Production Script” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1979), 92–93. Morgan presents Richards as a hayseed, having him speak with “a Utah drawl” and saying “Ahh, shucks” when General John J. Pershing compliments him.
17 Lee Benson and Doug Robinson, Trials and Triumphs: Mormons in the Olympic Games (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1992), 1–19.
18 See Lee Benson, “He Came, He Saw and He Went Home With Gold,” Deseret News, July 22, 1992, and “Alma,” BYU Magazine, 38–43, as well as derivative pieces by Twila Van Leer, “Utah Native Leaped to Fame in 1912 Summer Games,” Deseret News, March 25, 1995, reprinted January 14, 1996; see also “Alma Richards Was Utah’s First Olympic Gold Medalist,” Utah History Blazer, February 1995; Gib Twyman, “Route to Honor Utah Golden Boy,” Deseret News, June 20, 2001; Pardoe, Sons of Brigham, 449–52; Black, Mormon Athletes, 6–10. Wallenchinsky, Athens 2004 Edition, 343, is the only Olympics history or reference book that has carried the story; it adds, “He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and made a deal with God.”
19 Larry R. Gerlach, “Sporting Saints: Reshaping Mormon Identities,” in Bettina Kratzmuller, Mattias Marschik, Rudolf Müller, Hubert Szemethy, and Elisabeth Trinkel, eds., Sport and the Construction of Identities (Vienna, Austria: Verlag, Turia, and Kant, 2007), 453–61.
20 David J. Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics: Constructing an Olympic Identity,” Olympika 16 (2007): 1–18.
21 Harrison R. Merrill, “Utah Athletes Coming to Their Own,” Improvement Era, August 1928, 824. For the use of athletes in teaching the Word of Wisdom to young Latter-day Saints, see Richard Ian Kimball, Sports in Zion: Mormon Recreation, 1890 –1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003),107–24.
22 Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics,” 2–3.
23 Parowan was inexplicably left off the original route, but was added following substantial public protest and press criticism. Deseret News, January 12, 23, March 7, June 20, 25–28, 2001.
24 See David G. Pace, “Endowing the Olympic Masses: Light of the World,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 151–55; Church News (Salt Lake City), February 9, 2002; Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 7, 2002. For video of Light of the World and other LDS cultural activities related to the Olympics, see Friends to All Nations: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the 2002 Winter Olympic Games (Salt Lake City: LDS Church Productions, 2003), DVD.
25 Kimball, Sports in Zion, 189.
26 William O. Johnson Jr., All That Glitters Is Not Gold: The Olympic Games (New York: Putnam’s, 1972), 129; James Edward Sullivan, ed., Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1909 (New York: American Sports, 1909), 48.
27 The article concluded with Richards reflecting on the prayer the next day: “‘You must have felt like a hero after you did that 6 feet 4 inches?’” a companion asked. “‘You betcher,’” was the answer. “‘But maybe I didn’t pray to do that. I never prayed so hard in my life. The bar was at 6 feet 4 inches. I had talked about it to almost everyone that I expected to clear it at that height. I felt that I owed a debt. I was determined to clear the bar to clear myself. When I saw the stick at 6 feet 4 inches I thought for a minute that my confidence would fade away. If I was on my sick bed I wouldn’t have prayed any harder than to make that 6-foot 4-inch jump.” These effusive assertions of prayer are absolutely inconsistent with Richards’s subsequent silence on the matter. Further, the article contains a basic contradiction (Richards purportedly says he that “didn’t pray,” and then, in the next sentence, says he had “never prayed so hard”) and an impossible claim (Richards could not have boasted about clearing the six feet, four inches mark because he had no way of knowing the bar would ever reach that height). The conversation seems invented.
28 Deseret News, April 2, 1947, July 30, 1953.
29 For example, Albertani incorrectly wrote that Richards was in Parowan when the Olympic selection committee sent a written invitation to him to come to New York as a member of the team; that Amatuer Athletic Union officials in Utah had recommended him to Sullivan; and that, when in Stockholm, Richards had left his chickens and geese “to mother’s care,” although he had not lived in Parowan for three years. Albertani tried to paint Richards as an unschooled hick by having him say “you betcher”; and the sportswriter consistently misspelled Liesche as Litsche. Finally, Richards had missed twice, not once, at the six-feet, three-inches mark; he did not wear his hat in the final round; and he did not “walk leisurely back to the bench” after his record-setting jump, but instead paced back and forth for a time in front of the pit.
30 George Horine, San Francisco Call, July 18, 26, 1912; James Sullivan, “What Happened at Stockholm,” Outing Magazine 61 (October 1912–March 1913): 30.
31 Alma Richards to E. L. Roberts, July 9, 1912, printed in the Provo Herald, July 26, 1912.
32 Deseret Evening News, August 24, 1912.
33 BYUtah 1913 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Student Body, 1913), 186.
34 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 25, 1912.
35 Los Angeles Times, April 4–5, 1963; Iron County Record (Cedar City, UT), April 11, 1963; Long Beach Press Telegram, July 3, 1963; New York Times, April 5, 1963; James B. Miller, “Eulogy in Memory of Alma Wilford Richards,” box 1, fd. 10, Richards Papers.
36 Alma Richards to Jane W. Adams, printed in the Parowan Times, July 10, 1929.
37 Improvement Era, November 1942, 731. The Improvement Era published this piece in its section for LDS men eighteen years of age or older; thus Richards’s description of himself as “a boy” of twenty-two in 1912 was incongruous.
38 Harrison R. Merrill, “Utah Athletes Coming to Their Own,” Improvement Era, August 1928, 824. Asking a practicing Mormon to endorse tobacco may have indicated unfamiliarity with the Word of Wisdom, the LDS dietary code contained in Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants. On the other hand, the proscriptions regarding tobacco, food, and drink were not considered obligatory until 1921. See Thomas G. Alexander, “The Word of Wisdom: From Principle to Requirement,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (1981): 78–88.
39 Improvement Era, November 1942, 731.
40 Joseph F. Merrill to Alma Richards, August 24, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, Richards Papers; Deseret News, January 16, 1943.
41 For an account of the Richards-Liesche correspondence, see Larry R. Gerlach, “An Olympic Friendship: Alma Richards and Hans Liesche,” in Janice Forsyth and Michael K. Heine, eds., Problems, Possibilities, Promising Practices: Critical Dialogues on the Olympic and Paralympic Games (London, Ontario: International Centre for Olympic Studies, 2012), 45–50.
42 Alma Richards to Hans Liesche, February 20, 1954, box 1, fd. 2, Richards Papers. See also Arthur Grix to Richards, February 5, 1954, and Richards to Grix, February 25, 1954, box 1, fd. 3 and 5, Richards Papers.
43 Richards, Personal Statement, Richards Papers.
44 Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics,” 3, first raised this point.
45 Trent Toone, Deseret News, July 27, 2012; Lunt, “Mormons and the Olympics.”
