The 1936
Berlin Olympics will most likely be remembered most for Afro-American sprinter
Jesse Owens sticking his middle finger in the eye of German dictator, Adolf
Hitler. Okay, well he didn’t really, but
he may as well have. The dominant display of his athletic prowess earned him
four gold medals at the Games, shattering Hitler’s myth on the superiority of
the Aryan race.
South
Africa also has an interesting story from those games which involves lightweight
boxer Thomas Hamilton-Brown. It is quite an outrageous story actually. Very
little is written on Hamilton-Brown apart from that he was born in Cape Town in
1916 and is still alive today. His name
is not echoed in the same breath as any of the champions of the 1936 games but
rather mentioned either humorously or in ignominy.
In a
feat that can only be rivalled by THAT Bafana Bafana celebration, the South African
took on Chile’s Carlos Lillo in the first round of the boxing competition. The
bout ended with the winner being decided on points. Lillo was declared the
winner on a split decision. Hamilton-Brown, being the bad loser that any other
boxer is, went out on a binge after that contest. After a loss like that, ordinarily
you would think he’d go out and get hammered on cheap liquor like some of the
athletes did at this year’s Olympics, but that wasn’t so. Hamilton-Brown went
Benni McCarthy that night, found his solace in food and ate his way through his
disappointment at losing and gained 5 pounds in one sitting.
The
next morning it was discovered that one of the judges in that lost bout against
Lillo inadvertently switched his scores around. The mistake was rectified and
Hamilton-Brown was declared the actual winner. Unfortunately for him because of
his food glut the night before he was unable to shed any of the excess 5 pounds
he had gained before the weigh in of his second round fight and was
disqualified.
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