New Canaan There & Then: The World’s Greatest Athlete—Bill Toomey (Part 1 of 2)

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner.

The Year of Turmoil and Tragedy

October 19, 1968. It’s day two of the 1968 Olympic decathlon in Mexico City, and the 29-year-old American athlete is tired and discouraged, if not disconsolate. The prior day he completed the first five events of the competition in fine form, including a sizzling 100-meter dash time of 10.4 seconds and an even more impressive 400-meter effort of 45.6 seconds, the fastest time ever recorded in a decathlon. It had been an exclamation point to the wearisome 10 straight hours of competition that day. 

His performance in those events, which had taken place at the massive Estadio Olimpico Universitario, together with the long jump, shot put and high jump, had left him in first place at the end of day one.

Now on day two, however, he faces the eighth event of the decathlon, the pole vault, and he has just missed the relatively easy opening height on his first two attempts. He has one more attempt remaining, and if he fails again, his Olympic quest will come to an ignominious end. “I just about had a heart attack,” he later recalled. 

Thankfully that failure didn’t occur, and the near-miss cardiac victim, Bill Toomey, formerly of Cheese Spring Road and a 1955 graduate of New Canaan High School, pulled himself together and cleared the bar on his third attempt, ultimately recording his personal best in that event and paving the way for Toomey to become the “Greatest Athlete in the World.” 

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There was a time when there was no question as to the significance of an Olympic decathlon gold medal. As Time magazine put it in 1968, “Of all Olympic competition, the decathlon most closely reflects the original Greek ideal of all-round athletic excellence. An entire track and field meet in miniature, its ten events in two days add up to the toughest test of speed, stamina, strength and spirit ever devised.”

There’s probably no greater embodiment of a decathlon champion than Jim Thorpe, a Native American and member of the Sac and Fox Nation, who grew up in Indian Territory (today Oklahoma) and who won gold medals in both the decathlon and classic pentathlon at the 1913 Olympics in Stockholm. 

The 6’1” 202-pound Thorpe then went on to a career as a professional player in three sports: baseball (New York Giants), football (Canton Bulldogs, New York (football) Giants and Chicago Cardinals) and basketball (take that Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders).

After his performance in Stockholm Thorpe was appropriately dubbed “the World’s Greatest Athlete” by King Gustaf of Sweden (to which Thorpe allegedly replied, “Thanks King”). 

The sobriquet for the Olympic decathlon champion stuck, and has been applied to gold medalists ever since, including Americans Bob Mathias (1952, 1956), Rafer Johnson (1960), Bruce Jenner (1976), Bryan Clay (2008) and Ashton Eaton (2012, 2016), in addition to the young man from New Canaan.

The 1968 Olympics was extraordinary in many ways, including the fact that it hosted a number of Olympic “firsts.” 

It was the first Olympics Games to be held in Latin America; the first to include anti-doping tests (the first disqualification occurring – counterintuitively – when a Swedish athlete tested positive for excessive alcohol consumption); the first to feature synthetic tracks; and the first to feature a female lighting the Olympic Cauldron during the Games’ opening ceremony.

Another first: an Olympics held at altitude (7,546 feet – “thin air”), which helped propel competitors in Mexico City to extraordinary feats, the most memorable being Bob Beamon’s long jump of over 29 feet, shattering the previous world record by over two feet and being so long that it required a manual tape measure and fifteen minutes of measuring to determine the jump’s ridiculously historic distance at that time (it remains the Olympic record today, 58 years later).

Other notable American achievements included high jumper Dick Fosbury revolutionizing his sport by successfully jumping the wrong way – backwards – over the bar (the “Fosbury Flop”), Jim Hines becoming the first person to break the 10-second barrier in the 100-meter race, and the grizzled Al Oerter winning his fourth consecutive gold medal in the discus. 

As if athletic feats weren’t enough, politics played a large role in the 1968 Olympics. This isn’t surprising: the year started with the blood-soaked Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which cost Lyndon Johnson a second term as president, followed by the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, summer riots throughout American cities, and the election of Richard Nixon.

In fact the most iconic moment of the Games followed the 200-meter men’s final, when on the medals’ podium American competitors Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) lowered their heads and raised their black-gloved fists during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner to protest racial discrimination at home. 

As they were fellow U.S. track and field competitors, Toomey knew Smith and Carlos well. “They were good guys,” the now 87-year-old and still energetic Toomey said in an interview last week. “Over time the perception of their action changed from something everyone was upset about to a simple and peaceful civil rights act, which it was. Perhaps our nation needed a little bit of shock.”

1968 was a year of many shocks – a tumultuous and pivotal year marked by a polarization of America and the widening of generational, cultural and political divides over war, race and social justice. 

While not overshadowed, the pride that New Canaan experienced over its hometown son Bill Toomey’s amazing athletic prowess was tempered by the reality of the time. On the same front page of the New Canaan Advertiser’s October 24, 1968 edition that highlighted Toomey’s gold medal performance in Mexico City, there was a story about another son of New Canaan:

“First Lt. Richard Oliver Bickford, a paratrooper and West Point graduate who was an honor student and an athletic star at New Canaan High School before his graduation in 1963, was killed in Vietnam according to word received by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bickford.

They were notified Tuesday afternoon by an Army officer, who said the fatality occurred Friday. They are awaiting further details.”