92nd Infantry Division
On the 60th anniversary of his golden run, Harrison Dillard is returning to the Olympics
Watch Harrison Dillard's gold-medal winning effort in the 100 meters in the 1948 Olympics. The race is shown between 1:26 and 1:58 of the official movie, which has been dubbed in Italian. Dillard is at the far left of the field, and the camera lingers on Barney Ewell, who thought he had won the race.
Former
Olympian and Cleveland native Harrison Dillard is photographed at
John F. Kennedy High School during the Cleveland City Schools track
championships in 2004.
Harrison Dillard was four times an Olympic gold medalist, the equal in
that regard to his inspiration, idol and fellow Cleveland icon, Jesse
Owens. But like any track man, even a great one, Dillard knows records
are made to be broken. "The stopwatch doesn't lie," said the East Tech
and Baldwin-Wallace sprinter and hurdler.
On the 60th anniversary of his first Olympics, Dillard
will go to Beijing next week in time for the Aug. 15 start of track and
field competition. It will be his first foreign Olympics since he won
the 100 meters in London in 1948 and the 110 hurdles in Helsinki in
1952. No male runner has ever equaled that double.
He also was a member of the gold medal 4 x 100 relay teams in both England and Finland. In possibly the first-ever use of instant replay, Dillard and his teammates were awarded the 1948 relay gold three days after they beat Great Britain to the finish line, but were disqualified because a judge ruled they had passed the baton illegally. A film review overturned the disqualification.
Asked what he was looking forward to most in China, Dillard, 85, said the 100 meters. He said it with a bubble of excitement rising in his voice. He has spent 72 years in the sport as a competitor, official and avid fan. Listening to him, it is almost as if he can't wait to get to the showdown of Jamaica's Usain Bolt and the United States' Tyson Gay. One of them might break 9.65 seconds with perfect conditions. The stop watch doesn't lie.
That was the way Dillard ran to glory. Smaller and lighter than most of his rivals, and thus known as "Bones" for his slight frame, he was in a hurry from the get-go. He would get in front at the starting gun's crack and stay there.
Sixty years ago, Dillard flashed to the front in the 100 final in London. Running on the extreme outside in lane six (eight runners did not qualify for the final until 1964), he lunged for the tape. He was timed a full tenth of a second faster than the silver medalist, Barney Ewell, but Ewell capered and pranced around the field, embracing one and all in a victory celebration of his own.
Yet the photo-finish showed Dillard winning by two feet. Bronze medalist Lloyd LaBeach of Panama broke the bad news to Ewell. "Man, you no win. Bones win," he said.
"The tape at the finish line was cotton yarn. It would stretch before breaking. That was why Barney, way over in lane two, felt it on his chest too," said Dillard.
It was an unexpected triumph. "My first gold medal," Dillard said. "Nothing ever tops that."
He was expected to win the high hurdles at the Olympics too. Over barriers, Dillard was the best of his day. It's just that his day was supposed to dawn as quickly as he bolted from the starting blocks. Instead, it took a while.
He shockingly failed to qualify for the American team in the high hurdles at the 1948 Olympic Trials. Dillard almost made kindling of three hurdles when he hit them and stopped at the seventh one. Although he had already qualified for the Olympics in the 100, Dillard's specialty was the hurdles. He had won 82 straight races until losing at the AAU Championships earlier that year.
He left London yearning for the hurdles gold he had been expected to win. "Throughout 1952, what had happened in 1948 was always in the back of my mind," he said.
At Helsinki, at the age of 29, Dillard beat teammate Jack Davis when Davis hit the next-to-last hurdle.
Funny how things work out. The 110 hurdles resonate with track fans because it is one of the most athletic events in the sport, yet even the most powerful and nimble athletes are fallible in them. Sometimes, as in life, the best man does not win. But only a very good one, blessed with great flexibility, coordination, explosiveness, and balance, is ever going to stand on the top step of the medal podium in the hurdles.
As a black man in the Jim Crow era in America, Dillard faced greater obstacles than those on a cinder track, even while fighting for his country.
He served in World War II in the 92nd Infantry Division, the "Buffalo Soldiers." A famous segregated division, dating back to the days after the Civil War, the all-black Buffalo Soldiers fought the German Army in the mountains of Italy. Dillard, a private first class, won master sharpshooter badges both with the M1 rifle and .45 caliber pistol. "I never fired guns before or after the war. It was just something I was good at," he said.
In the final months of the European war, the Buffalo Soldiers entered an Italian town whose name he has now forgotten. The Germans had just fled.
"Normally, we felt like liberators," he said.
But every door was closed and every blind was drawn.
"We found out that other American troops had told the Italians that our division would rape all the women," Dillard said.
Later, the townspeople held a banquet for them. They had come to realize the Buffalo Soldiers lived by the division's motto, "Deeds, not words."
Dillard had idolized Jesse Owens all his life. He went to East Tech, the same high school as Owens, but he balked at going to Ohio State, Owens' alma mater. He feared homesickness and the difficulty of coping at such a large school. Instead he went to Berea to B-W, a Division 3 school today, a school that was a far cry from mammoth OSU in Dillard's day, too. He ran and jumped, and when he was through, everyone knew about the Yellow Jackets.
For that reason, B-W officials will honor him today with an informal lunch at the school.
He will tell you that, because of his arthritic hip, "it sometimes feels like 160 years" since London in '48.
The stopwatch doesn't lie. We expect improvement in athletic performances for many reasons, including training methods, video study, equipment and nutrition. We cannot stop the clock when Dillard seized the day by breaking the tape or skimming over the last hurdle.
But what he did so long ago will last forever. Against the world's best, they were deeds, not words.
Bill Livingston,
The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com -
Cleveland,OH,USA
| Harrison "Bones" Dillard 92nd Infantry Division |
August 8, 2004 - Men of mettle
Possessing world-class speed,
Harrison Dillard and Jesse Owens were indisputable
Olympic stars. But in a time of divided world culture, the
Cleveland natives also helped inspire dreams and push for
equality.
The track that circled the soccer field at Wembley Stadium in the 1948 Olympics was a boulevard of broken dreams.
Wreckage from World War II still lit tered London. The practical British took one part bomb rubble, one part crushed brick, a few parts chemicals and cement, and added a generous helping of the "waste not, want not" spirit that had seen them through the war.
"It was a beautiful red track, made from rubble. The color was unusual. We usually ran on cinders or clay, so the tracks were black or gray," said Cleveland's Harrison Dillard. Soon, he would run the Olympic 100 meters over that red road of ruin as fast as any man ever had. After failing to make the U.S. team in the 110-meter high hurdles, an event he dominated, "Bones" Dillard so named because of his tall, skinny frame would prove that hopes are not as perishable nor hearts as breakable as many think. Dillard, 81, is Cleveland's greatest Olympian except for Jesse Owens. The two are linked forever by more than the coincidence that they were both graduates of East Tech and four-time Olympic gold medalists.
Dillard won two gold medals as a member of the U.S. 4x100-meter sprint relay team in 1948 and '52. He became the only man ever to win both the Olympic 100-meter sprint (in 1948) and the 110 hurdles (in 1952.)
The guns sounded for real when America entered World War II. Dillard served in the Mediterranean theater with the 92nd Infantry Division. They were the men who inherited the famous name of "Buffalo Soldiers" from black units in the American West following the Civil War. It was an all-black division, except officers higher than captain rank were white.
Burrowed into a foxhole in Italy, Dillard watched the "Tuskegee Airmen" of the 99th Fighter Squadron, another all-black unit, fly off to engage the enemy. "It made you think," said Dillard. "Our feeling was to wonder, if we could be sent there to fight and maybe to die, why there were restaurants and hotels we couldn't go into back home?" There was no good answer to the question, so he would keep asking it.
In 1952, Dillard tried to register at the athletes' hotel for a meet in Chicago. Told by a clerk at the front desk that he had not made a reservation and no room was available, he walked across the lobby, called the desk on a pay phone, and made a reservation. He then walked back and politely pointed out to the same clerk that he had a reservation now and wanted his room key.
Unbeatable at the "G.I. Olympics," held in Frankfurt, Germany, after the war, Dillard received the highest praise of which salty General George S. Patton was capable. "You're the best goddamned athlete I've ever seen," Patton said.
Dillard's time of 10.30 seconds equaled the world record. Ewell, who won the silver medal, and LaBeach, who took the bronze, were both timed in 10.40.
Four years later, Dillard won the Olympic gold medal in the 110 hurdles in Helsinki, Finland, thus reaching the highest expression of the dream Owens had given him. "I was at a party once with Dizzy Gillespie," Dillard said. "Somebody asked Dizzy why he was listening to the music of an old dude' like Louis Armstrong. Without that old dude, there'd be no Diz,' he said. Jesse was like that, an inspiration to thousands, if not millions of us."
Perhaps Harrison Dillard was like that, too. "I'd like to think there might have been some kid like me out there," he said. He filled Jesse Owens' shoes better than he realized.
(Bill Livingston, Plain Dealer
Columnist )
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