In ‘Three Kings,’ Todd Balf Tells Story of Leading Lights of 1924 Paris Olympics
Todd Balf has visited the era between World Wars many times in his work. In looking for a new book project, the former senior editor of Outside magazine was drawn back there not just by the era’s mystique but by the confluence of history and performance.
The 1920s were an age where the question of how to cover distance in the water in the fastest and most efficient way remained very much open. In a larger world, separate schools of thought could attack the question in different manners.
The 1924 Paris Olympics were a proving ground for three such schools of thought. From Hawaii, Duke Kahanamoku arrived, aged 33, with gold medals in the 100 free at the 1912 Stockholm and 1920 Antwerp Olympics. Just 20, Johnny Weissmuller was the upstart from Chicago’s emerging program. And 17-year-old Katsuo Takaishi represented a completely unknown program, representing Japan.
All had different methods of moving in the water. But they shared plenty in common, as Balf’s book, Three Kings: Race, Class and the Barrier-Breaking Rivals who Launched the Modern Olympic Age, describes. He teases out the similarities of how each pioneering swimmer moved in the world, the adversities they surmounted and the sacrifices they made to even get to Paris.
Balf’s fifth book adds a touch of the personal. He survived a bout of cancer and a spinal injury that led to partial paralysis, which led him back to swimming as a rehab method. That uncomfortable process of learning how to move in the water and how to incrementally improve brought into focus the unknown into which swimmers a century ago waded.
“I think I connected on both an emotional level where I think you’re trying to overcome something that is getting in the way of your enjoyment, your performance, your love of something,” he said. “But also I kept thinking about certain innovations that were being made by some of those swimmers and them experimenting in the pool.”
Balf spoke to Swimming World about his book, which is available for sale now online or at your local bookseller. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
SW: You’ve written extensively about sports in this era before. What is that draws you the early 20th century?
Balf: As a historian and a lover of sports, I grew up with great sports stories that influenced me as a kid, everything from John McPhee talking about Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe and that great depiction of tennis, but it was also about class and about race. I think that stuck in my head for a long, long time. I think I’m sort of naturally inclined to look for those stories.
With Major, which was about cycling in the early part of the 20th century, that was something that was right up my alley, because of the issues of race but also sports performance, which has always intrigued me. As an editor at Outside magazine and freelancer for the magazine, I often wrote about those sorts of things. So merging both the history and the breakthroughs or the attempts at breakthroughs, I think, is really what I’m interested in.
I kind of stumbled across the 1920s era of swimming. I definitely credit Bonnie Tsui’s book, Why We Swim. I personally got into swimming because of a rehab out of necessity and a pretty severe injury. And learning how to swim again also got me reading about swimming. Bonnie mentions in her book this pivotal race in Hawaii later in the 20s, and it brought together in my mind a lot of things that really interest me. Duke Kahanamoku was there at the end of his career and was actually retired at that point, and it was Johnny Weissmuller, who was in all his glory having just won the gold medal in Paris, and you had the Japanese contingent that was emerging and doing something that nobody really anticipated. So when I thought about those aspects, I was just drawn. And once I’m drawn in, I’m fully committed. So three years later, the book comes out.
SW: You talk about the politics and the racial overlay of it all, and I wonder how you put into perspective someone like Duke Kahanamoku being a global superstar for the U.S. at a time when Hawaii wasn’t even a state yet.
TB: It is remarkable when you think about the current state of athletics and what some of the sacrifices of Olympians are. Then you look at Duke’s story, and when he traveled in 1912 to the mainland for the first time for the trials, he didn’t get back home until eight months later. It gives you a sense of the sacrifice, not just physically but mentally. This is the first time that he had been on the mainland. His origin story, to live in an independent nation that was overthrown basically by U.S. business interests, really puts into perspective what he had to overcome. The education that he knew as a youngster was completely changed by the time that the U.S. had raised the flag over Hawaii and he became part of a second-class sort of system, where there were no opportunities for someone like himself, who dropped out of high school and was basically working on the beaches to get a little bit of money.
And suddenly, he sets this world record that nobody can believe. I think the prejudice that he endured as a person with dark skin. Everything was centered in New York, essentially, and the records were kept there. The legislation about whether it was a legitimate record or not was determined there. It wasn’t so simple as setting a record that blew the records apart at the time, but he had to then come to the mainland and prove it all over again. There was just disregard for everything Hawaiian.
SW: Katsuo Takaishi remains a rather obscure figure, especially compared to the other two. What drew you to his story? And it seems like researching his life was maybe one of the most revelatory parts of this process for you?
TB: I think that’s one of the aspects of the book that I’m proudest of because I don’t feel like there has been mainstream attention to the origin story of swimming in Japan and the figures that led to this revolutionary aspect of swimming at the Olympic level. It really was a blank spot, for me and for others. I think Takaishi was known to the extent that he was recognized by the International Swimming Hall of Fame, but there wasn’t much beyond that to tell his story.
To actually get to talk with his daughter, for instance, who is in her 80s, and it was a long process – years, really – just to get to that final point where you’re seeing photographs that were family heirlooms. Hearing how a family member describes their father who was this pioneer, but also the other scholarly folks and historians in Japan who were incredibly helpful and influential in telling this story for my book. I think for the first time, you’re starting to hear this story about not just the origins of Olympic swimming in Japan, but the personal stories of the coaches, the way they made it happen. It really was an odds-against story that you really can’t even believe. They barely had a swimming pool. They had no facilities. They literally dug their own swimming pool, set records there and developed the crawl, a stroke that really changed many aspects of how coaches were thinking about the stroke at the time.
I think that was one of the things that really drove the book as well, just how each of these swimmers – Johnny and Duke and Takaishi, were pushing this stroke in particular. We take for granted the crawl now, but at that time, everybody was trying to investigate, what was the key to making somebody go really, really fast in the water. Nothing was really set in stone, because they didn’t have underwater film, they didn’t have aspects that today we take for granted. So I think that level of curiosity, for a swimming nation like Japan, but also in Chicago and the tank swimmers from the Midwest, and then the open water swimmers in Hawaii, everybody was sort of looking at the same thing and trying to advance the sport. And I found that fascinating.
SW: What do you think your favorite part of this book process was?
TB: Spending time in Hawaii was definitely great. I think that was one of the first places I designated that I wanted to be. There are great books about Duke, but also I wanted to tell stories and understand the lasting influence of Duke among contemporary swimmers and surfers, because his legacy is vibrant. I really wanted to understand that both from the outside but asking people to share with me some of their stories, and that’s kind of a touchy thing. You’re sort of relying on people to trust and share stories, and not just about the memories of Duke, but what his influence was and what it continues to be to this day. I found that was extremely illuminating.
I think in the same way, even Johnny’s story, which again, certain aspects have been told time and again, but I think that investigating some of the origins of his upbringing, which he didn’t like to talk about, I think it added some empathy to his story. I think his later life colored a lot of people’s perception of who he was. But when you research the place that he grew up, the broken home that he grew up in, it explains a lot. And somebody might not think that there were many obstacles for him as a privileged guy growing up in Chicago, but that’s not really the case.
Each of these people – in Takaishi’s case, he had to overcome this earthquake that leveled Tokyo at a time when everything was in question, even of who survived at that point. And in Johnny’s case, it was a really turbulent upbringing with one of the most horrific race riots happening at a time when he was just a teen. And in Duke’s case, it was the changing nature of Hawaii and the overthrow of their independent nation. So I feel like each of those stories lends richness to what they actually did.
SW: You write about your journey with swimming in the book, and I wonder how that colored this book adventure. Did it change your connection to some of these figures as you were having your own personal journey with swimming?
TB: I talk in the book about how I grew up around the water, but I didn’t really swim in any kind of a serious way, and oftentimes it was not really something that I chose to do. And in going through my medical hardships – which included cancer and a spinal injury and partial paralysis where I really couldn’t independently do anything in the water really other than calisthenics – I think once you kind of problem solve and the obstacle is found, which in my case was just I needed more buoyancy so I put on a wetsuit with a compartment that added more flotation – and suddenly I’m swimming and I’m going through the strokes that I hadn’t really done since I was a youngster. Suddenly, I was at a point where I just wanted to know more. As I was swimming and I was thinking about the aspects of the story, I think I connected on both an emotional level where I think you’re trying to overcome something that is getting in the way of your enjoyment, your performance, your love of something. But also I kept thinking about certain innovations that were being made by some of those swimmers and them experimenting in the pool. Even the way Johnny’s coach was teaching people how to swim, he had novel methods for that, because that was such a big part of that era that so many people had no idea how to swim and people were drowning because of it.
So just a sort of playfulness of trying things and seeing how they worked out in the water, and whether some of those things worked out or didn’t, it was being able to experiment with some of the things that I was thinking about and writing about and learning about.