Rio 2016: An act of supreme sportsmanship and the bond it created

Hans Liesche and Alma Richards

Alma Richards on the way to win the gold medal

At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the final stages of the high jump culminated in a head-to-head contest between a 22-year-old American, Alma Richards, and a 21-year-old German, Hans Liesche. George Horine, the world record-holder and favourite, was eliminated early in the final; as was the famous Jim Thorpe. That left Richard and Liesche to slug it out until one of them failed.

Liesche, a lithe ship-builder from Hamburg, looked most like a winner, and cleared the bar easily each time it was raised. Richards, from Parowan, Utah, seemed too heavily built to be a jumper, and his strange style, with both knees drawn up almost to his chin, made it seem like a miracle each time he cleared a new height.

Then, when the bar reach 1.93m (an Olympic record), Richards suddenly cleared it with ease, at his first attempt. Liesche was not so lucky. At each of his three attempts, something happened on his approach to interrupt his concentration: first a starting gun fired, then a band played, then an official told him to hurry up. Understandably, he messed up all three jumps, and Richards, the rank outsider, won gold.

Then Liesche showed his quality. Refusing to show bitterness, he kissed Richards on the cheek and gave him his “hearty congratulations”. And that, for the time being, was that.

But Richards could never quite forget Liesche’s generosity in defeat. He kept asking himself “if I could have taken the defeat so graciously”. He often described Liesche as “the best jumper in the world” and said that his sportsmanship would “always stand out in my mind as the outstanding thing of our part of the games”.

Silver medalist Hans Leische

There was a world war, in which both men fought, on opposing sides; then there was another one, in which Richards did not take part but Liesche, seeing military service as preferable to joining the Nazi party, volunteered. Finally, in 1953, Richards met a German-born coach and former athlete in Los Angeles, and asked her about Liesche, his “old rival and friend”. It turned out that she had met him and, in due course, was able to put Richards in touch with one of Liesche’s clubmates, with the aid of whose translation a warm correspondence began.

Liesche admitted that “I have thought often of A Richards and wondered whether he is still alive”; Richards confessed that, when he went to Europe to fight the Germans in 1918, “I prayed that I wouldn’t meet you on the field of battle”. He added that “I have always felt that you should have won the 1912 high jump.” Liesche insisted that “the best high jumper on that particular day in Stockholm was not Hans Liesche… but certainly Alma Richards, USA, who mastered the winning height of 1.93 metres as no one else did.”

It later emerged that Liesche’s home had been destroyed in the war, along with his silver medal. A friend of Richards arranged for a duplicate medal to be sent to him, which he “received with tear-dimmed eyes”.

Although neither man spoke a word of the other’s language, they continued to correspond until Richards’s death in 1963 – and even then Liesche kept in touch with his widow. As Larry R Gerlach wrote in his excellent monograph, An Olympic Friendship: Alma Richards and Hans Liesche: “The correspondence of Alma Richards and Hans Liesche does not add to our understanding of the fundamental political, economic, or social issues confronting the Modern Olympics. It does, however, illuminate what Pierre de Coubertin intended to be the primary focus of the Games—a mutual understanding, respect, and, ultimately, friendship among international athletes.”