INTERNATIONAL GAMES - ENGLISH AND AMERICAN TRACK ATHLETICS The story of international track athletics begins with the early eighties, when several of the indi vidual athletes who had been developed by that time in this country left their victories behind them and set out to find new worlds to conquer. They found them all right enough and their suc cess encouraged others, so that hardly a record breaking performer has appeared during the past twenty years who has not amused himself by gilding his fame with a few victories on foreign fields. Brilliant specialists like Meyers, Page, Wefers, Kranzlein, and Arthur Duffey have thus carried their successes abroad. Numbers of athletes of lesser brilliancy have won occasional victories at the English summer championships. Even in the shadow of the Parthenon the laurel has been won by young Americans who were Greeks in muscle and spring at any rate, however little they may have known of or cared for Arte mis or Apollo. And then, most pleasant of all to remember, are those days on which the tradi tional varsity rivals of ours and of the mother country have joined forces against each other, and our young athletes of Harvard and Yale have met those of Oxford and Cambridge on the same field and track.
Long before track athletics were organized in either country and before the distinction between amateur and professional was in any way accu rately defined, George Seward, the New Haven sprinter, had gone to England and beaten every one in sight at all distances up to a quarter mile. That was in 1844. Nearly twenty years later, Deerfoot went to England and beat out all the distance men. In 1878 C. C. McIvor of Mont real, who had won the hundred at our national championship the year before, went abroad and entered in professional races. He was badly beaten. The first real American amateur to com pete in England, so the late " Father Bill " Curtis once wrote, was probably Mr. Richard H. Dud geon. Mr. Dudgeon had offices in both London and New York, belonged to both the New York and the London Athletic Clubs, and competed in both countries under the colors of each club. Beginning with the early eighties the records of the annual English championships are frequently punctuated with the names of American athletes — spiked-shoed adventurers setting out from home cocky in their strength, flying, in spirit, the privateer's flag. The phenomenal Meyers and
E. E. Merrill, the champion American walker of that day, were the first of them. They went abroad in 1881. Meyers won the quarter mile championship and made a new English rec ord of 48k seconds for the distance. Meyers weighed only one hundred eleven pounds, and his body, when in repose, was not pretty. " Father Bill " Curtis told a story of an Englishman who happened to get into Meyers's dressing-room. "'Pon my soul," said he, "the fellow's nothing but skin and bones and porous plawsters." A number of Englishmen came over to Amer ica during the next few years, most of them to stay. The most notable visitor was W. G. George, the English mile champion. He contested a triple match with Meyers — a mile, a three-quar ters, and a half. Meyers won the half easily enough and George the mile ; the three-quarters was taken by George. In 1884 Meyers went abroad again, this time accompanied by several other American athletes. The only ones of these to distinguish themselves were W. H. Meek, who won the seven-mile championship walk and sev eral other walking races, and Meyers himself, whose triumphal course has been described in another place. In 1885 Meyers again went abroad and again beat everything in sight. In 1885 a team of Irish athletes visited Canada and the United States. Barry, the hammer-thrower, of Queen's College, Cork, was among them. He won the Canadian championship. Purcell, another of the party, won the Canadian high-jumping champion ship and took second place in the American individual championship. Several of the others gave a fair account of themselves. In 1887 an other party of American athletes went to Eng land. W. Bird Page, the high jumper, was the best of them. In the English and Irish cham pionships he was unlucky, tying in each with his nearest rival ; but on other occasions he won at such heights as 6 feet i inch, 6 feet 4 inches, and 6 feet 34 inches. This last performance was at that time the world's record.