How race, celebrity and speed dominated the pool at the 1924 Olympics

Competition took center stage in the men’s 100m freestyle final at the 1924 Summer Olympics – then, as now, hosted by Paris. A century ago, swimming epitomized the Roaring Twenties. It was an era of fast music, fast vehicles – and fast swimmers. Yet if the battle for bragging rights in the pool was stiffer than ever, it was also occurring under more equal conditions: In a first, elite swimmers of different races got star billing at an Olympic final – a challenge to the era’s popular pseudoscience of eugenics and widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the US. A new book, Three Kings: Race, Class, and the Barrier-Breaking Rivals Who Launched the Modern Olympic Age by Todd Balf, revisits the 1924 100m freestyle final as we approach the 2024 edition this week .

“I think that the interest, in part, was just these three swimmers of different skin colors who really wanted to be the fastest there ever was in the signature event, the 100m,” Balf says of his motivation for writing the book. “I was looking into these fellows. They were described in the press in almost like superhero terms – mermen, they were flying fish, torpedoes.”

The three kings of the book’s title were Americans Johnny Weissmuller and Duke Kahanamoku, and Japan’s Katsuo Takaishi.

Before he starred as Tarzan on-screen – his first appearance in the role would come in 2032 – Weissmuller was a Chicago-based pool sensation, emerging from a working-class background to break record after record. The man whose records he often broke was legendary Hawaiian Kahanamoku, who encountered racial prejudice in his quest to compete at the highest levels of sport. Takaishi similarly faced derogatory assessments, particularly around his physique, which was judged inferior to the contemporaneous Western ideal.

The book examines the backgrounds of each athlete, giving attention to wider historical events that shaped their lives. Weissmuller, originally Johann Weissmuller, was born to German-speaking parents in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – they emigrated to the US due to economic hard times. Kahanamoku came of age during the American takeover of Hawaii – the Hawaiian language had been banned from schools in the state in 1896, and whites-only swim clubs began to spring up. Takaishi grew up in a Japan that was debating how it should interact with the rest of the world – including whether it should scrap swimming strokes developed in the samurai era in favor of Western techniques that offered a better chance of success at the Olympics.

The narrative attracted Balf’s attention through his renewed interest in swimming. A decade ago, he was diagnosed with cancer. After post-surgery complications, he lost the ability to walk. Accustomed to an active lifestyle, he sought new ways to exercise while at a rehab hospital in Massachusetts. When swimming was suggested, he initially brushed it off: He recounted an ill-fated open-water swim attempt for Yankee magazine in which he had to be rescued. Then he learned about a wetsuit that allowed him to swim in the hospital pool. From there, he grew curious about the origin of the strokes he practiced, especially the crawl, now synonymous with freestyle.

“I was reading a lot of things,” he says. “In the course of that, I basically bumped into the story of samurai swimmers, Hawaiian champions and the person we would come to know as Tarzan today – the three main characters of the book. After being exposed to that, I was hooked, trying to understand who they were and where they came from.”

Kahanamoku came first. How determined was he to compete in swimming? Unable to join segregated clubs, he and his friends formed their own – Hui Nalu, “Club of the Waves.” Shaking off a rough start at the 1912 Olympic trials, he went on to compete in the Stockholm Games that year, beginning a stretch of three Olympics and five medals. The narrative of the renowned swimmer and surfer left a deep imprint on Balf, who spent extensive time in Hawaii researching Kahanamoku and interviewing big-wave surfers. “Duke remains a legend in Hawaii,” Balf says.

As the 1924 Games approached, Kahanamoku had to contend with a challenger almost half his age: Weissmuller, who endured a difficult upbringing in Chicago. His father walked out on the family, abandoning Johnny, his younger brother, Peter, and their mother. Weissmuller found a refuge at the Illinois Athletic Club, where he caught the eye of coach Bill Bachrach, who also had an eye for the vast number of records that could be set in swimming, and how this could be used for publicity purposes. Weissmuller became Bachrach’s prize pupil.

In Japan, another teacher-student relationship was yielding positive results. Takaishi grew up heir to centuries-old swimming strokes once used in warfare. Yet when Japanese athletes used these strokes at the 1920 Olympics in Belgium, they became a laughingstock. It took Osaka-based coach Den Sugimoto to study Western techniques and teach them to his school students, including Takaishi. Sugimoto even got students to build their own pool and fill it with water diverted from nearby farmland.

Each of the three contenders entered the 1924 Games with question marks. Japan was reeling from the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which killed more than 100,000 people and left the country wondering if it would field a team at all for Paris. Kahanamoku was at a career crossroads and faced underwhelming expectations at the US Olympic trials – which took place in Indianapolis, the same venue as this year’s. As for Weissmuller, he faced a 1920s version of a “birther” controversy – an investigation over whether he was an American citizen. The issue of his citizenship was raised due to his birthplace abroad – but Balf suggests his family tweaked his baptismal records to indicate he was American-born, securing his spot on the Olympic team. The secret stayed dormant for years.

“You can imagine how afraid he was of being found out and having whatever he won in Paris being taken away,” Balf says.

The Games themselves were mired in uncertainty. Were they a serious sporting event involving the world’s greatest athletes every four years, or merely a spectacle? As Balf explains, the lofty vision of their modern-day founder, Pierre de Coubertin, often jostled up against embarrassing realities. Athletes had to swim in freezing open water in the first modern Games in Greece in 1896, the 1900 edition in St Louis featured a racist event mocking the athletic ability of indigenous cultures, and the 1920 Olympics took place in a Belgium still recovering from the first world war, not far from battlefields filled with corpses. Yet by 1924, the Olympics were approaching professionalism in Paris. The City of Light had a brand-new swimming stadium, the Piscine des Tourelles, which remains in existence. The pool boasted marked lanes and the venue had a capacity of more than 10,000. In another first for swimming, the men’s 100m freestyle final would have a live broadcast.

“Swimming was sort of an unexpected star of the Games,” Balf says. “I don’t think it’s really been recognized as it should be. Swimming really stole the show.”

Weissmuller ended winning the 100m sprint final in an Olympic record of 59.0 seconds. In total, he won three golds – he also grabbed victories in the 400m freestyle and 4x200m freestyle relay – and a bronze that year. Kahanamoku won silver and his brother Sam won bronze.

Kahanamoku finished fifth, went on to have minor roles in almost 30 Hollywood films and helped popularize his other big sport, surfing. Takaishi’s Olympic career was just beginning and he won a silver and bronze at the 1928 Amsterdam Games, paving the way for increased Japanese swimming success at the Olympics.

“All three of these men, where they had such different cultural upbringings, they stood really in contrast,” Balf says. “You wouldn’t even think these guys had a lot in common with one another. The commonality was swimming.

“I really did want to know what the three thought of one another. In a certain way, swimming kind of trumped everything else that was different about them.”