Bob Mathias

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Bob Mathias was born in Tulare, California, to a family with partial Greek lineage. He attended Tulare Union High School, where he was a classmate and longtime friend of Sim Iness, the 1952 Olympic discus gold medalist. In early 1948, his track coach Virgil Jackson suggested he take up the decathlon. That summer, after graduating high school, he qualified for the U.S. Olympic team for the 1948 London Games. At age 17, he became the youngest gold medalist in a track and field event. In the Olympics, his naïveté about the decathlon was exposed: he was unaware of the rules in the shot put and nearly fouled out, and almost failed in the high jump but recovered. He overcame these difficulties with superior pole vault and javelin scores to push past Ignace Heinrich and win gold. In 1948, Mathias won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation's top amateur athlete. Because his scholastic record in high school did not match his athletic achievement, he spent a year at The Kiski School, an all-boys boarding school in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania. He then entered Stanford University in 1949, played college football for two years, and was a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He set his first decathlon world record in 1950 and led Stanford to a Rose Bowl appearance in 1952, the first nationally televised college football game. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, he won the decathlon by 912 points, establishing a new world record, and became the first person to successfully defend an Olympic decathlon title. His 7,887-point total at Helsinki remained the school record at Stanford for 63 years until it was broken in 2015 by freshman Harrison Williams. In 1952, he was the first person to compete in an Olympics and a Rose Bowl the same year.

Reader's Guide

Bob Mathias's significance lies in his rare combination of athletic, political, and entertainment achievements. As a decathlete, he won two Olympic gold medals and set world records, establishing himself as one of the world's greatest all-around athletes. After graduating from Stanford in 1953 with a BA in education, he spent two and a half years in the U.S. Marine Corps, promoted to captain and honorably discharged. He later became the first director of the United States Olympic Training Center, a post he held from 1977 to 1983. In politics, he served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from 1967 to 1975, representing the northern San Joaquin Valley of California. He defeated 14-year Democratic incumbent Harlan Hagen by about 11% in the 1966 election. He voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He was re-elected three times without serious difficulty, but in 1974 his district was significantly redrawn and renumbered as the 17th, and he was narrowly defeated by John Hans Krebs. Mathias was one of several Republicans swept out of office in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He also served as deputy director of the Selective Service from June to August 1975 and as a regional director in Gerald Ford's unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. In entertainment, he and his wife Melba appeared on the April 29, 1954, edition of You Bet Your Life, where he mentioned a forthcoming film called The Bob Mathias Story in which the couple played themselves. He starred in mostly cameo-type roles in movies and TV shows throughout the 1950s, including the 1959–1960 TV series The Troubleshooters, where he played Frank Dugan, and the 1960 Italian film Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete, where he played an athletic Theseus.

Did You Know?

• At age 17, Mathias became the youngest gold medalist in a track and field event at the 1948 London Olympics.
• He was the first person to compete in an Olympics and a Rose Bowl the same year (1952).
• His 7,887-point total at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics remained Stanford's school record for 63 years, until 2015.
• He won the decathlon at the 1952 Olympics by 912 points, setting a new world record.
• Mathias was one of several Republicans swept out of office in the wake of the Watergate scandal.