Full Circle

Editor’s Note: You can follow 2024 Stanford-affiliated Olympians at gostanford.com/paris2024. 

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In 1924, the Summer Olympics were held in Paris. They were the first to be broadcast on radio. The number of women competing slightly more than doubled from the 1920 Games—to 135. The first Olympic Village debuted, complete with running water. And, oh yes, Stanford athletes claimed 21 medals (all in men’s events and more than the combined school total up to that point), leaving notable impressions—on the field, in the water, and, well, possibly on the bruised faces of Parisians.

In 2024, the Olympics are again in the City of Light. NBC’s Peacock will livestream more than 5,000 hours of coverage. About 5,250 women will participate. The Olympic and Paralympic Village promises a fitness center and global food options. And Stanford-affiliated athletes will no doubt do what they do: clean up. According to Stanford Athletics, they’ve won 296 Summer medals since the school’s Olympic debut in 1912, mostly for the United States, mostly gold. And since the 1990s, mostly in women’s events. In 2020, athletes with Stanford ties earned 26 medals; just one went to a man.

1924/International Olympic Committee/Associated Press

We don’t yet know how the 2024 Games will turn out, but we can tell you that the 1924 Games lit a rough-and-tumble spark that set off a tradition of Olympic dominance. No matter what, we’ll always have Paris. 

Summer Batte, ’99, is the editor of Stanfordmag.org. Email her at summerm@stanford.edu.

ROWDY BUNCH: The 1924 rugby final, U.S. vs. France, included nine players with Stanford ties—most of them rusty, all of them ready to rumble. (Photo: Press Association/AP Images)

Last Fandango in Paris

by Sam Scott

Eager to kick off the Olympics in style, the French all but begged the United States to send a rugby team to Paris in 1924. Against all odds, the Americans had beaten them for gold in the 1920 Games, a humiliating defeat that—four years later—offered the French an enticing upside. A rematch in front of a revenge-hungry home crowd would be the perfect way for the hosts to begin the Games avec fracas.

There was just one hitch. In the four years since the last Summer Olympics, Americans had essentially forgotten rugby existed. A special invitation was in order. “The entire French community is awaiting your response, which, if negative, will result in deep disappointment and sadness,” the French Olympic Committee wrote to its American counterpart in September 1923. The Gallic guilt trip worked. Newspapers were soon spreading word that tryouts for a U.S. rugby team would begin that December. 

By the time the 22 U.S. team members—including nine current and former Stanford players—docked at Boulogne-sur-Mer on April 28, the warmth of the invitation was nowhere to be found. The French Olympic Committee failed to appear at the port upon the arrival of the Americans, the first U.S. contingent to have reached France. Authorities seized their luggage and denied them entry. The athletes, seasick from the rough voyage, reacted as if they were already facing their opponent. “They said we couldn’t get off the boat, we didn’t have any visas,” Norman Cleaveland, Class of 1923, one of the team’s (speedy) backs, recalled seven decades later. “So we said, ‘That’s what you think.’ We charged through the gendarmes and through the barriers.” The U.S. consul eventually untangled the mess, but the “Battle of Boulogne” was just the beginning. The Americans’ quest for rugby gold in 1924 would go down as one of the most controversial in Olympic history. The result, in the words of rugby historian Tony Collins, was “arguably the biggest shock ever in world rugby.”

The Pitch

It is somewhat misleading to talk about the American team representing the United States. There was really only one state involved. Even the team’s coach referred to them as the “California rugby team.” And no entity was more central to California’s unique relationship with rugby than Stanford. In 1906, Stanford and Cal had imported the “English game” to California after a nationwide spike in deaths had made football seem untenable. While a violent sport itself, rugby had rules, such as a ban on blocking, that avoided early 20th-century football’s mauling mass plays, the culprits behind much of the carnage. Schools across the state, from Santa Clara College to the University of Southern California, soon joined the scrum.

USC would return to football in 1914, Cal a year later, but Stanford students voted in 1916 to stick to rugby. Then, in the fall of 1918, World War I put the university largely under control of the U.S. Army, which considered football a better outlet for future fighting men. In 1918, orders were issued to revert to the gridiron, a decision that would prove permanent even as civilian rule of campus returned. The U.S. team that went to the 1920 Olympics—nearly half from the Farm—was essentially the California rugby experiment’s last hurrah. Even their surprising gold medal in Antwerp stirred little new interest in the sport, least of all at Stanford, where a new 60,000-seat football stadium soon testified to the changed order. “Rugby passed away almost unnoticed last quarter,” an article in the Stanford Daily from January 1923 noted. “The sport that for 1906 until 1918 held undisputed sway during each fall quarter on the Stanford campus . . . had but a few mourners at its funeral. This is the first year since the rugby game was taken up in 1906 that the old English sport has not been played on the Farm.”

1924/International Olympic Committee

With no new collegiate rugby stars, the 1924 U.S. team was drawn from a ragtag collection of relics—who had hardly touched a rugby ball since the last Olympics—and rookies recruited from football. Their obvious shortcomings likely helped explain the French appetite to play them. “France was very insistent that the title-holder enter a team so that she might be given the opportunity to remove the laurel wreath from the crown of her dear brothers from the USA,” wrote Dudley DeGroot, Class of 1924, MA ’29, PhD ’41, a hulking former captain of the Stanford football team, who was new to rugby. Cleaveland was blunter: “They were looking for a punching bag.” The Californians intended to punch back. They practiced through the spring, then embarked to England for a series of warm-up matches. They lost two of three games but kept the scores respectable. One of the English players suffered a broken leg in the third game, evidence of the fact the Americans could compensate with force for what they lacked in skill.

For several reasons—including that Wales, England, and Scotland had a long history of competing as separate teams, and that English rugby leaders generally saw the Olympics as the wrong venue for the game—Britain did not send a rugby team to Paris. In allegiance, neither did Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the southern powers associated with the British Empire. In fact, besides the United States and France, the only rugby team in Paris in 1924 was Romania, whose lack of experience all but assured a gold medal rematch between the Americans and the French. 

Goals

Winning still seemed a long shot. The French were in their own backyard, fielding players honed against Europe’s best. The U.S. athletes were 5,600 miles from home, and they were beset by a sense of being unwanted. “Many times we were treated with open hostility,” the U.S. team manager wrote to American officials, claiming the French used their control of local fields to stop the Americans from scrimmaging. There were reports of U.S. players being spit at on the street. And when they hopped a fence topped with barbed wire to finally get in a practice at the main stadium, their locker room was cleaned out by thieves. During the U.S. rout of Romania, the French crowd booed the Americans with a vehemence that stunned the players, not least because only six years had passed since U.S. troops had helped the French win World War I. “Why they harboured such an open hatred for a nation who had done so much for them will never be understood by the members of the American rugby team,” DeGroot wrote.

The French grievances were layered. The U.S. team’s reaction at the port had gone over badly, and their manager had publicly battled over everything from filming rights to who’d referee the game. Plus, the U.S. intervention in the war and subsequent peace wasn’t cause for universal hosannas. “The Americans were not regarded as heroes for bringing France her liberty,” author Mark Ryan writes in his 2009 book, For the Glory: Two Olympics, Two Wars, Two Heroes, a deeply sourced account of the 1924 U.S. team. “They were a reminder of recent French weakness.” But a major antagonism was the style of American rugby itself—more football-like violence, less rugby-like skill. “As for the method employed, it is that of the pugilist,” the French newspaper Le Petit Journal wrote, “always that of the pugilist.” 

That resentment reached fever pitch in the final after two French players, including the team’s star, fell to injury and the Americans surged into the lead. Soon 40,000 spectators weren’t only shrieking and whistling; some were trying to scale the fence to the field. Several American supporters were bludgeoned over the head with canes. “They were laying them out on the field, waiting for the ambulances to come. We thought that some were dead, and we thought that it was only a matter of time before we would be dead,” Cleaveland later said. The French players themselves joined the fray, punching and kicking U.S. players. When the United States team prevailed 17–3, fans nearly rioted. “An American photographer, while attempting to take a picture of the American flag at the top of the Olympic pole, was hit by various missiles thrown by the enraged spectators,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The headline “Booing Drowns ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as Police Escort Victors from Field” topped the New York Times. “Perhaps it was fortunate that the poor sportsmanship of the French people did serve to advertise the American team, for without that publicity they might have fought and won, without recognition,” the United Press sports editor wrote, calling the win “the brightest entry that has been scored on all the pages of America’s international sports records.”

But back at Stanford, the news was greeted with a yawn. The Daily relegated the victory to the final sentence of a 1,000-word story more focused on Cleaveland’s time in England teaching British society “Give ’em the Axe.” It was almost as an afterthought that the article ended on page 2 with “Sunday they played their last game against the French team, whom they defeated by a score of 17 to 3, thereby winning the Olympic championships.” The paper’s earlier reports of rugby’s death on campus had apparently not been greatly exaggerated. 

Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.

TAKING FLIGHT: Neher, the first female Stanford athlete to travel to the Olympics, spent more than a week aboard the America with her male Stanford counterparts (left) after countless training dives in the Stanford pool (right) and at Searsville Lake. Photos: Courtesy Carlson Family (3)

A New Platform

by Sam Scott

The USS America set sail from New Jersey on June 16, 1924, to fanfare reportedly unseen at the waterfront since the return of troops from World War I. Ocean liners let shriek their whistles, ferries blasted horns, and fireboats shot water cannons into the sky. The reason for the excitement was written down the length of the departing ship in giant white lettering: American Olympic Teams. As the vessel steamed away, the athletes aboard began to turn from the crowds toward the challenge ahead—how to stay fit on an eight-day voyage to France.

Clarita Hunsberger Neher, Class of 1927, MA ’27, later remembered waking each morning to the patter of running feet. Soon the whole deck would come alive: boxers in the ring, wrestlers on mats, and swimmers in a canvas tank barely big enough for two of them to splash through while tethered in place. Even the javelin throwers contrived to hurl their spears off the bow—and pull them back by 300-foot ropes. Divers, like Neher, couldn’t be so easily fished out of the water. “The high divers used to get kidded,” she recalled in an oral history more than 60 years later. “They would say, ‘Now look, all you have to do is dive off the side of the ship.’ There wasn’t a thing we could do.”

It wasn’t the only way Neher stood apart from the larger group. The modern Olympics had begun in 1896 as an all-male endeavor. And though women had joined in 1900, progress had been minimal. In the summer of 1924, women made up just 4 percent of all Olympians, their participation limited to fencing, tennis, and swimming and diving. Aboard the America, the gender split was slightly less severe, but Neher was still part of a rarefied group, one of only 25 women among some 300 men. Viewed from a modern Stanford perspective, however, she was something even more special. At a university that has come to be synonymous with female Olympic excellence—in the 2020 Games, Stanford-affiliated women won 25 medals, more than most countries—Neher, an alternate in the high dive in 1924 and a competitor in 1928, represents the beginning of Stanford’s female Olympic tradition.

Her introduction to aquatics had nothing to do with competition. When Neher was around 10, her father—a “dog paddler,” by Neher’s account—and a friend were caught in a rip current and pulled out past the pier in Long Beach, Calif., not far from her Los Angeles home. Her dad was rescued, but the other man drowned. “My father decided at that point that I should learn how to swim and learn how to swim well,” she said. By the time she was 13, a local “college of swimming” was hyping her prowess in a newspaper ad as the “Girl Fish” who would “eat, write, sing, sew and sleep under water and swim with hands and feet tied.” A woman noticed her doing laps and invited her to try out for the elite Los Angeles Athletic Club.

Perhaps she wasn’t quite fast enough or her petite stature—she was 5 feet tall—simply seemed suited for diving, but her coach suggested she try the springboard. She took to the new sport immediately, finishing second at junior nationals the summer after her high school graduation. But it was at Stanford where she blossomed under the husband-and-wife coaching team of Ernst and Greta Brandsten, both former Swedish Olympians. “They were really gung-ho on having a woman who would be a diver,” Neher later recalled. No matter the time of year or the conditions, one of them would meet her in the morning at the women’s swimming pool. “I can see myself going out on that springboard,” Neher said in a draft of a speech, “and there would be a layer of frost on it.” Other times she’d dive over a sand pit, her coaches pulling tight a rope belted to her waist before she ate dirt. “It saved time,” she said. “Within a few seconds I could be right back on the board.”

Eventually, the Brandstens took her to Searsville Lake, where the couple had constructed 16- and 32-foot-tall high diving towers, the latter more than three times as high as the springboard. High diving was a tough sport. It wasn’t uncommon for divers to lose teeth bottoming out in shallow pools. At Searsville, Neher would climb a three-story ladder with missing rungs. The platforms would sway in the wind, and natural fluctuation in the lake’s water level meant Neher was never sure exactly how far she was diving. Without a car, she sometimes walked the five miles each way to the lake and back. But she loved it. “Right from the start I knew that high diving was my thing,” she said. “I used the platform better than the springboard.” With the Brandstens’ encouragement, she tried out for the Olympics. Her sorority, Delta Delta Delta, provided the money for the three-night train journey to the New York trials. Eight days later, she was on the America, setting off for France.

The logistical challenges hardly stopped at the Paris docks. Swimmers and divers were lodged on the far side of the city from the pool and spent several hours each day commuting on buses. Practice sessions turned into a Tower of Babel as divers from different nations struggled to communicate. And organizers had built the diving platforms facing the width of the pool, not the length, creating a nightmarish situation where divers couldn’t see the water as they ran up to certain dives off the top platform. “All we could see were the cement seats on the other side of the pool,” Neher said. “Psychologically, it was terrifying.”

‘All we could see were the cement seats on the other side of the pool. Psychologically, it was terrifying.’ 

As an alternate, Neher wasn’t called on to compete in Paris, though in 1928, she went to Amsterdam with a roster spot. (She was joined by high jumper Marion Holley [later Hofman], Class of 1930, in the first Olympics that included track events for women.) But the Dutch diving platforms weren’t completed in time, and the result was a return to the 1924 site. “Darling as [the Dutch] were, they sent us by train to Paris, back to that pool where we had to go through that again,” she said. Neher said she always thought that if she’d medaled, it would have been the most important day of her life. That was not to be. Her most lasting Olympic memory was the emotion of the 1924 opening ceremonies in Paris, walking into the stadium. “We came out of that darkness, that tunnel, into the light of day,” she said. “Well, the whole place, I couldn’t believe it, it just came alive. Coming out into the bright light and having everybody stand up, and people were standing and cheering and shouting and waving flags, and the tears rolled down our faces.”

Neher, who would go on to become a teacher and a school administrator, and who died in 2001 at age 95, wasn’t successful in her bid for a third Olympics. But she did return to the Games—in Los Angeles in 1984, when she served as an ambassador on the Spirit Team, made up of former Olympians. Before the opening ceremonies, she’d been concerned about how Americans would greet the country’s geopolitical rivals. But as in Paris, the event surpassed her expectations. “I’ll never forget when they had that parade of nations and those athletes from China marched in, it just seemed to me as though 90,000 people must have stood up at one time,” she said. “And I thought, ‘That’s it. Our audience understood what the Olympic Games really mean.’”

Much has changed in the century since Neher watched those 300 men and 24 women train on a steamer bound for Paris, not least this: These Olympics mark the first Games in which men and women will compete in equal numbers. 

Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.

CARDINAL GOLD: Brandsten (above, center) coached at Stanford for more than three decades, much of it in partnership with his wife, Greta (top and left). (Photos clockwise from bottom: Courtesy Jan Johansson (2); ISI Photos  

Stanford’s Big Splash

by David O. Stewart

At the 1924 Games, Stanford-trained divers swept the men’s springboard and “fancy” platform diving events—gold, silver, and bronze times two. A Farm feat, to be sure, but also an accomplishment that remains unmatched a century later and is credited largely to one man: Stanford and U.S. Olympic diving coach Ernst Brandsten. “Diving was nothing in this country before he got here,” says Bruce Wigo, the historian at the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Brandsten, who coached diving—and swimming, and water polo—at Stanford from 1916 to 1947, launched an era of American diving domination, reshaping the sport with innovative teaching methods and contributions to equipment improvements. The 1924 men’s sweep included Al White, Class of 1924, who became the first diver to take gold in both the 10-meter “fancy” platform (soon merged with “plain” into a single platform event) and springboard diving events—a feat matched in 1928 by Pete Desjardins, ’32. The United States had arrived.

Born in 1883, Brandsten grew up in Sweden, the birthplace of modern diving. German and Swedish gymnasts had recently begun training over water to secure softer, safer landings when they practiced jumps, flips, and twists. Brandsten graduated from the Stockholm School for Swimming in 1902 and embarked on a young adulthood that reads like a madcap adventure—travel through the United States, work on fishing vessels, a mapping expedition for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. In 1910, he and a friend launched “Vikings from Sweden” in the Bay Area, a diving show that capitalized on a craze for daredevil stunts.

Brandsten won no medals competing for Sweden at the 1912 Olympics but two weeks later claimed the country’s national diving title. He became Stanford’s aquatics coach in 1916 and began building a powerhouse with his wife, Greta Johansson Brandsten, Swedish gold medalist in the first women’s Olympic diving event, in 1912, and, starting in 1916, director of the newly built Roble women’s pool. The couple also built and operated a recreation area at Searsville Lake, complete with beaches, boats, picnic facilities, and, naturally, high-dive platforms.

As Brandsten pushed diving to become increasingly acrobatic, Stanford divers were subjected to his revolutionary training techniques. They walked tightropes to improve their balance. And to pack more dives into shorter practice periods—Brandsten believed that becoming a champion diver required 80 practice dives a day for six years—they dove off a board into a sandpit, for dry-land training.

Brandsten’s influence extended to diving boards themselves. At the 1924 Paris Olympiad’s Les Tournelles swim stadium, controversy swirled around possible dark-of-night tampering with the springboard’s fulcrum point to benefit specific divers. After the Games, Brandsten, with fellow coach Fred Cady (who led USC’s diving team for 33 years), sought to prevent future such controversy by designing an adjustable fulcrum that readily adapted a springboard to each diver’s preference. Brandsten also developed laminated springboards with a Douglas fir core, which increased bounce height, giving athletes more time in the air to perform intricate dives. His patented design was the basis of more than half of America’s springboards until the 1950s, when it yielded to the newfangled aluminum boards that remain the standard today.

In Paris, Brandsten’s divers dazzled. The U.S. team included nine men and one woman (Neher, an alternate) from Stanford. The Stanford men “far outclassed all other divers in the Olympics,” claimed the Stanford Daily, “just as America far outclassed all other countries in the entire swimming meet.” Of 15 diving medals awarded that year, Brandsten’s team nabbed 11; Australia, Sweden, and Great Britain scrabbled for the remaining four. Over the four Olympics in which Brandsten served as coach—1924, 1928, 1932, and 1936—his American charges vacuumed up 42 of 51 men’s and women’s diving medals. His Stanford athletes—divers and swimmers—earned nine Olympic gold medals, and his divers won 25 Amateur 
Athletic Union national championships. Brandsten, the so-called father of diving in the United States, coached on the Farm for 31 years, a Stanford aquatics tenure only surpassed in 2010, by former men’s swim coach Skip Kenney. 

David O. Stewart is the author of the upcoming book The Warrior and the Peacemaker, about George S. Patton Jr. and Philip Noel-Baker of Britain. Email him at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.