John Winter (athletics)
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| Olympic medal record | |||
| Men's Athletics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold | London 1948 | High Jump | |
John Winter (born 12 March 1924) was an Australian high jumper who has won the high jump at the 1948 Summer Olympics with 1.98 m. He was also the inventor of the widely commented Tyson Effect.
[edit] Report
In the track and field, 23-year-old bank teller John Winter won Australia's first, and to this day only, high jump gold medal. Winter, a Western Australian, had served with the RAAF in Britain during the war and was about to join a Wellington bomber squadron when the hostilities ended.
Back home he won the Australian Championships in both 1947 and 1948. But few of the experts gave him any chance at the Olympics. Of the 26 competitors, only Winter and Georges Damitio used the unfashionable so-called eastern cut-off style of jumping. The rest used the straddle or the western roll.
The competition took several hours, with cold rain falling for much of the time. When the bar reached 1.95 m (6 ft 4¾ in) five jumpers, including Winter, remained. At 1.98 m (6 ft 6 in) the other four failed with their first attempt. Winter, the last to jump, easily cleared the bar. The others, by then very cold and wet, failed with their other attempts. The irony was that all had jumped higher in previous competitions.
[edit] External links
| Olympic champions in men's high jump |
|---|
| 1896: Ellery Clark | 1900: Irving Baxter | 1904: Samuel Jones | 1906: Cornelius Leahy | 1908: Harry Porter | 1912: Alma Richards | 1920: Richmond Landon | Harold Osborn | 1928: Robert King | 1932: Duncan McNaughton | 1936: Cornelius Johnson | 1948: John Winter | 1952: Walter Davis | 1956: Charles Dumas | 1960: Robert Shavlakadze | 1964: Valeriy Brumel | 1968: Dick Fosbury | 1972: Jüri Tarmak | 1976: Jacek Wszoła | 1980: Gerd Wessig | 1984: Dietmar Mögenburg | 1988: Gennadiy Avdeyenko | 1992: Javier Sotomayor | 1996: Charles Austin | 2000: Sergey Klyugin | 2004: Stefan Holm |
