No discussion about the rise and fall of the “jumping Irishman” (An Irishman’s Diary, August 8th) can be complete without the remarkable story of James Brendan Connolly (1868-1957), a Boston-born son of the Aran Islands.
At the revived Athens Games of 1896, he became the first gold medallist of the modern Olympics when winning the hop, skip and jump competition.
So doing, he bridged a 1,500-year gap to the Armenian pugilist Prince Varasdates, held by some scholars to have been the last champion of the ancient Games, in 369AD.
In later life, Connolly made the unusual leap from athletics into literature, becoming a very successful novelist.
Jump Around - Frank McNally on the other James Connolly
Great Leap Backward – Frank McNally on the continuing decline of the ‘Jumping Irishman’
Claims to flame – Frank McNally on yet another Dublin siege and the story of the Catacombs, now and then
Servant of a new Ireland: Brian Maye on former unionist John Bagwell
His contribution to letters may also have included an unusually profound influence on a young Maeve Brennan, the future short story writer.
As a US envoy to Ireland in 1921, he saved Brennan’s father – a prominent republican – from the Black and Tans. The Brennans later moved to New York, when Maeve’s literary career flourished.
In a memoir, Thirty Years Avoyaging (1944), Connolly recalled that both his parents were of “seafaring stock”, as far back as they could trace.
Like many Aran Island families, he added, they each claimed as a likely ancestor the Galway sailor who was supposed to have crossed the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus.
They too sailed to America eventually and raised 12 children, including eight boys in a row, in the Irish emigrant enclave of south Boston.
After a short education there, Connolly joined the US Army Corps of Engineers. Then an urge for self-improvement gradually propelled him to Harvard, where he arrived as a 27-year-old mature student of the classics.
Alas for scholarship, he was also by then a talented sportsman. And his belated elevation to the famous Boston university coincided with the even more belated revival of the Olympics.
For an athlete and classicist, that was an irresistible prospect. For the dean of Harvard, meanwhile, it was an unacceptable distraction. Refused temporary leave from his studies, Connolly was told he would have to quit the course and reapply when he returned.
The dean warned that, with advancing age, he might not be accepted a second time. Waving goodbye to higher education, Connolly walked out anyway.
As recorded in his memoir, the anticipation he felt about the Olympics was not that of the average athlete.
“For the remainder of that winter my mind was on the Games and a voyage to Athens. Violet-wreathed Athens! Marbled Athens! The Athens of Homer, the wanderer, the adventurer, the sailorman who had been three times shipwrecked. Homer’s Odyssey – Chapman’s translation – was high on my list of favourite books.”
The journey to Greece was itself epic. Train to New York, ship to Naples, train to Brindisi (where Connolly had his wallet stolen and had to flee the police investigation or miss his ferry), then down the Adriatic to Corfu, Patras, and finally another 10-hour rail trip to Athens.
Arriving on April 5th, 1896 to a late-night reception, the Americans thought they still had 12 days to prepare. Then they discovered that the Greeks were using the Julian calendar. The games were only hours away.
Connolly was ready anyway. His first jump did enough to win the gold (it was actually a silver medal then, with copper for second place, both retrospectively upgraded).
Although that was his only victory of the Games, he went on to win medals in the long and high jump too. Four years later in Paris, he added a second-place silver to his career total.
Writing aside, the older Connolly also had political ambitions. He ran for both the US Congress and Mayor of Boston, neither successfully.
But in 1921, he persuaded an Irish Relief Committee to send him to Ireland as its representative and spent time touring the troubled country.
He was important enough for General Nevil McCready, the British commander, to invite him to Dublin Castle. Based on their conversation, Connolly later told Oliver St John Gogarty that Ireland would be granted dominion status within months.
Connolly’s autobiography, written in 1944, ends on a political and anti-imperialist note, expressing scepticism about the then widespread belief that the US would have to “police” the postwar world, effectively governing former enemies.
This he considered strongly inadvisable. “The South of Ireland, with a population of three and a half million, with a few thousand men armed only with pistols and hand rifles and fighting without cover, stood off 80,000 soldiery for two years,” he warned.
How much greater would America’s occupying armies have to be to keep subject peoples in line? “More and more,” he wrote in the last sentence of the memoir, “the trend of the age is toward people ruling themselves.”
Remarkable as Connolly’s evolution from sportsman to writer was, it did not inspire his novels. Those were mostly about life at sea.
This led a sniffy Irish Times critic once to call him “a poor man’s Joseph Conrad”. And perhaps that was true. But if so, it seems only fair to counter that, at the very least, Connolly was a better novelist than Conrad was a jumper.