In the early days of the Olympics, competing in multiple sports was far from unusual.
At the loosely organized 1904 Olympics, at which the United States won at least 230 (sources vary due to uncertain citizenship for many competitors) of the 280 medals awarded over nearly five months as a sideshow to the St Louis World’s Fair, Franz Kugler became the only man to win medals in three sports in the same Games – hitting the podium in wrestling, weightlifting and tug of war. In 1908, eight US track and field athletes – including Irish-born hammer-throwing legend Matt McGrath – entered the tug of war competition, only to withdraw in protest over the shoes worn by the Liverpool Police team, who went on to lose to their fellow law-enforcement personnel from London. A lot of events were unofficial “demonstration sports,” such as the 1912 baseball games featuring even more US track and field athletes.
In modern times, competing in two sports in the same summer is considerably less common. A Guardian analysis of data from the Olympic-stats site Olympedia turned up no athlete pulling double duty at the same Summer Olympics since 1992 (athletes such as cyclist-rower Rebecca Romero and baseball player-speed skater Eddy Alvarez have won medals in two sports at separate Olympics).
That drought will end on Wednesday, pollution permitting, when triathlete/cyclist Taylor Knibb competes in the women’s triathlon in Paris, four days after finishing 19th in the road cycling time trial, in which she crashed several times on a slippery day in Paris.
Olympic cyclists are often well-suited to tackling multiple challenges. Kristen Faulkner and US teammate Chloé Dygert, who won bronze in last week’s time trial, will contest the road race on 4 August, and then move to the velodrome to compete together in the women’s team pursuit two days later. Knibb also qualified for the road race, but USA Cycling has announced that she will give up her space in that race to Faulkner. Faulkner is the US champion and has plenty of experience in the rough-and-tumble world of a road race peloton, unlike Knibb.
But Dygert, Faulkner and the hundreds of other road and track (or, less commonly, mountain bike or BMX) cyclists aren’t considered two-sport athletes because Olympic lingo makes a distinction between competing in two disciplines and two different sports. This distinction is based on which sports are overseen by which federations, so it’s not always obvious. Bobsled and skeleton are under the same federation, while luge is not.
Such distinctions, though, aren’t always acknowledged. Skier/snowboarder Ester Ledecka is generally considered the first woman to win gold medals in two sports at the same Olympics even though her two sports, alpine skiing and snowboarding, fall under the auspices of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. The men with two gold medals in seemingly different sports from the same winter – Norwegians Thorleif Haug (1924, Nordic combined and ski jumping) and Johan Grøttumsbråten (1928, Nordic combined and cross-country skiing) – also competed in two sports under the same umbrella.
And because World Aquatics oversees everything in which someone goes into the water without the aid of a boat, we technically can’t call athletes such as Duke Kahanamoku – a world record-setting relay swimmer and water polo player – “two-sport” competitors. If only Kahanamoku, regarded as the “Surfer of the Century,” had lived a century later, perhaps he could have ridden the waves to official two-sport status.
Knibb’s combination seems inherently logical, competing in a multievent sport (triathlon) and one of its constituent parts (cycling). The last two-sport Summer Olympians before her embarked on similar doubles in fencing and modern pentathlon several decades ago. The Winter Olympics still have the occasional cross-country skier dabbling in biathlon or vice versa. Sheila Taormina, the only woman to participate in three official sports in the Olympics, gradually expanded her repertoire from swimming to triathlon to modern pentathlon. (Dutch athlete Truus Klapwijk competed in swimming, diving and water polo in the 1920s, but the latter was not an official event at the time.)
Yet Knibb will be the first athlete to compete in cycling and triathlon in her career, let alone in a single Olympics, according to data at Olympic-stats site Olympedia. Taormina is one of only two Olympic triathletes who also competed in swimming at the Games.
Knibb already has a triathlon medal, a silver from the mixed relay in Tokyo. This year’s relay is on 5 August, and while she hasn’t officially been selected for the team, visions of a repeat medal this time around were surely amplified when she handed her second cycling event to Faulkner and will not be spending the day before the relay in a 158km bike race that includes a climb up a cobblestone road with a 6.5% gradient.
Not that Knibb lacks for endurance. She is a two-time world champion in the Ironman 70.3 (1.9km swim, 90km bike, 21.1km run). She has also competed in the full Ironman World Championship, which doubles all those distances, finishing fourth.
One good omen for Knibb: Other athletes who have doubled up have wound up on the podium. Three-time fencing Olympian Paul Pesthy won his only medal in the modern pentathlon team event in 1964 (silver), when he also made his first appearance in fencing. Another three-time fencing Olympian, Harold Rayner, won his only fencing medal in 1920, the same year he also competed in pentathlon.
Knibb didn’t win gold at the time trial. But Ledecka wasn’t expected to win skiing gold, either. It was worth the effort: the more events athletes enters, the more chances they have.
Other notable multi-sport Olympians
-- Franz Kugler is the only man to win medals in three sports (tug of war, weightlifting, wrestling) at the same Olympics, albeit at the haphazard 1904 Olympics.
-- Six athletes have won medals in the Winter and Summer Games in different sports:
US boxer-turned-bobsledder Eddie Eagan is still the only Olympian to win gold in both Olympics in different disciplines. (Figure skater Gillis Grafström won gold in the Summer and Winter Olympics but in the same event – until the Winter Olympics debuted in 1924, figure skating was held in the summer.)
Norway’s Jacob Tullin Thams had a similarly esoteric combination, winning ski jumping gold and sailing silver.
Cycling and speedskating form a more common combination. Canadian Clara Hughes earned multiple medals in each sport, while East German Christa Luding-Rothenburger will remain the only person to win Winter and Summer medals in the same year, unless the IOC makes a surprising revamp of the Olympic calendar.
Bobsledding is a popular second sport for track and field athletes, but US sprinter Lauryn Williams is the only person with medals in both sports.
-- Rebecca Romero medaled in rowing and track cycling in 2004 and 2008, joining East German swimmer-turned-handball player Roswitha Krause and several swimmers/divers as two-sport medalists.
-- Surprisingly, Japan’s Ayuma Hirano is still the only athlete to compete in snowboarding and skateboarding. Shaun White ramped up to make the Tokyo skateboarding team but instead decided to focus on snowboarding.
--Whether future general George Patton was actually on the 1912 US fencing team is up for debate, as is the question of whether one of his missed shots in pentathlon actually passed through a hole left in the target due to his insistence on using a larger-caliber pistol.
-- And we can’t forget Pita Taufatofua, who has proudly waved the Tongan flag in three opening ceremonies while shirtless and slathered in oil. He competed in taekwondo in 2016 and 2021, with a stint in cross-country skiing in between. He attempted to qualify for the 2024 Olympics in taekwondo and canoe sprint but came up short, pledging to save his stockpile of coconut oil for another time.
