Sports Physician - Athlete 1881-1882

1881

In 1908, Eugène Olivier (1881-1964) crowned the French fencing team as an Olympic champion with the sword. At those London Games he also won bronze in the individual event. He founded the Paris University Club of which he became the first president and from 1905 to 1913 he was a member of the French national team. Normally he would have also disputed the 1912 Games in Stockholm, but France withdrew a few days before the start because it did not agree with certain changes in the rules. As a son of a gynecologist and as a member of three generations of doctors he also started studies in Medicine. After graduating, he specialized in Surgery and Anesthesia. In 1912 he was appointed Deputy Head of Surgery at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris. During World War I he worked in the Center de Fistuleux Osseux du Mont-des-Oiseaux of Hyères and in the Centre de rééducation et d'appareillage des Tirailleurs Marocains of San-Salvadour. In 1923 he acquired the title Docteur des Sciences and agrégé des facultés de médecine and was appointed as Professor of Anatomy. From 1923 to 1926 at the University of Lille, then to that of Paris and to the Institut d'Education Physique de l'Université de Paris.

1882

Constantin Henriquez de Zubiera (1882-?), a student of Medicine of Haitian origin, was entitled to claim that he was the first colored Olympic competitor. With the French team he won the first Olympic rugby title at the 1900 Games in Paris. Later he and his teammates took second place in the tug-of-war. With Stade de France he crowned himself three times as a French rugby champion. In 1904 he introduced the football game in his homeland, and he also scored the very first goal for Haiti. With his brother Alphonse who became a lawyer, he founded l'Union Sportive Haitienne and in 1950 he was elected senator in his country.

1882

Herman Groman (1882-1954) won bronze in the 400m at the 1904 Olympics in St-Louis. The American team was then represented by the Chicago Athletic Club runners. He graduated from Yale University like his father and grandfather and in 1907 he started as general practitioner in Hammond, Indiana.

1882

At the 1908 Olympic Games in London, Harvey Sutton (1882-1963) ran the 800m for Australasia, the combined team from New Zealand and Australia. He got into the semi-finals, but his third place did not give him a final battle. He improved the Australian record over the half mile several times. During his university studies he defended his alma mater in lacrosse, cricket and athletics. In 1905 he graduated from the University of Melbourne and he did research in the New College of Oxford in England into the effects of increasing body temperature on the metabolic rate. After a career as a Sutton Medical Officer at the Charing Cross Hospital and the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, he returned to Melbourne where he held the same position at the Victorian Department of Public Instruction until the beginning of World War I. During World War I he was captain of the Australian Army Medical Corps and he led the Australian Imperial Force in Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria, the Sanitary Section, Anzac Mounted Division and the Anzac Field Laboratory where he focused on specific problems in dysentery and malaria . After the war he became Principal Medical Officer of the New South Wales Department of Public Instruction in Melbourne and he taught Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Sydney. In 1930 he was appointed head of the newly established School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He was also interested in sports medicine and in 1920 he took part in the foundation meeting of the Australian Universities' Sports Association, in which he spent his entire career.


rdsm