Berlin Games (33 page)

Leonard had been brought up with guns. His father had bought him, aged six, a .22-calibre rifle with a 20-inch barrel. ‘He put a military sight on the back of it,' Leonard remembered, ‘so I could get a really good sight picture. He gave me preliminary rifle instruction until it came out of my ears. He even built a twenty-five-foot range in our basement.' Leonard was an exceptionally fine shot, but until the Berlin Olympics nobody knew quite how fine. The rules of the pistol shooting were complicated, and involved shooting four series of five shots into a 1.65-metre silhouette positioned at a distance of 25 metres. The silhouette had a ringed target set over it, with the scores ranging from 1 on the outside of the ring to 10 for a bull's-eye, which was about five inches in diameter and lay in the equivalent of the silhouette's solar plexus. The silhouette was visible only for three seconds, however, which allowed very little time to aim and let off five shots. The silhouette then disappeared for ten seconds, during which time the shooter had to reload before it reappeared. The theoretical maximum number of points that could be achieved was therefore 200–twenty bull's-eyes. Nobody had ever achieved that score before.

When Leonard arrived at 9 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 4 August at the range of the 67th Infantry Regiment at Ruhleben, he looked more like a dandy from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald than a sportsman. He wore a neatly ironed white shirt, complete with a starched detachable collar with wing fasteners, a silk tie, a sleeveless cricket jersey, dark woollen slacks, highly polished black shoes and a double-breasted, brass-buttoned blue blazer. A black beret added a touch of the Maquis to the appearance. ‘Pistol shooting is a gentlemanly game,' he recalled. ‘You don't have to lie down on mats.' Leonard was carrying a .22-calibre Colt on a .38-calibre frame, which made it a little heavier than the normal .22. Leonard's only concession to the fact that he was about to take part in a sport rather than charm women at a garden party was to remove his jacket before he started shooting. Indeed, the few women present in the stand would doubtless have been drawn to him–Leonard was a handsome man.

Nevertheless, looks do not win competitions, and Leonard had some shooting to do. As usual over the Olympic fortnight, a slight breeze was blowing, which occasionally disturbed the shooters as it blew from behind them. Four athletes shot at four separate silhouettes simultaneously, with each of the marksmen shielded from the others and the sun in small wooden open-backed cabins. At the back of each cabin stood the off-putting presence of a German army officer, and behind him were more officers, sitting at tables and keeping the scores. Behind them were the stands, packed chiefly with even more army officers. This was hardly the most civilian of events.

Leonard started shooting as soon as the first silhouette popped up, doing just as his father had taught him–holding the pistol firmly but not too tightly, watching the sights and squeezing the trigger. His first five shots hit the bull's-eye. A lucky start, he thought. The silhouette disappeared, and Leonard smoothly reloaded the Colt with five more rounds. The silhouette came back, cutting a slightly comical figure with its helmet and slightly effeminate mouth. Leonard shot five more times, and scored another fifty points. This was too good to be true. So far he had a perfect score. The officers in the stands leaned forward, the wood creaking under their combined bulk. With the third and penultimate series, Leonard hit inside the 10 ring another five times. He had 150 points. He reloaded for the final time, doing his best to
stop his hands shaking. Leonard then lifted his pistol, aiming with his right eye, his left eye partially closed, waiting for the silhouette to spring back. When it did so, he fired. His first shot hit the bull, as did the second. He was on 170–already a good score. The third shot brought him to 180. With just over a second of time left, he let off his fourth shot. Another bull's-eye. He had just one shot to go.

If Leonard had scored 190, then he would have been placed around fifth or sixth in rapid-fire pistol shooting. Instead, he came first, unassailably so. His final shot had brought his score to a perfect 200 points. It was a stunning achievement, and it put Leonard in sight of a medal. Unfortunately, Handrick had scored 192 points, which was enough to keep him in the lead. Nevertheless, with the swimming and the running to go, both events in which Leonard was strong, there was a chance that Handrick's lead could be snatched. After the shooting, Leonard found himself being mobbed back at the village by those wanting to know the secret of his success. ‘I have explained about my pistol and what I do many times–grips, squeeze, kind of sights,' he wrote in his diary the following Monday. ‘They were most surprised to find it has almost 3lb pull, they expected a hair trigger.' Many asked him whether his performance relied on something medicinal to steady him. ‘I do
NOT
use dope,' Leonard wrote angrily.

The fact that his fellow athletes asked Leonard about dope indicates that performance-enhancing drugs were not the taboo subject in the Olympic village that they are today. Presumably, had Leonard admitted to taking dope, there would have been little or no fuss. The reason why he was angry with the suggestion was that taking dope would have been an ungentlemanly thing to do, rather than something illegal. Doping had been present in sports since the Ancient Olympics, in which competitors had eaten beef in the belief that it magnified their strength tenfold. As new drugs were developed, the world of sport quickly started to abuse them. In the nineteenth century, morphine was used in endurance sports. The Welsh cyclist Arthur Lindon was the first sportsman known to have died from abusing the drug. In the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, the marathon runners used immensely dangerous substances to give themselves an edge. The winner that year was the American Thomas Hicks, who is said to have taken a couple of milligrams of strychnine washed down with brandy and raw eggs
to push himself to victory. It was considered somewhat miraculous that he didn't die–had he taken a third milligram of strychnine, then he would have done. Drug abuse certainly took place at Berlin, but its extent is a matter of conjecture. The drug used would have been amphetamine–probably in the form of Benzedrine, which was developed to be taken via an inhaler in the late 1920s. Amphetamine–now commonly referred to as speed–would have given tired athletes a much-needed boost, and as such it would have been used in sports that required successive days of intense competition, such as the pentathlon and the decathlon.

 

If taking drugs was one form of cheating, then pretending to be a member of the opposite sex was another. The question of men–or hermaphrodites–passing themselves off as women became an issue at the final of the women's 100 metres at four o'clock on Tuesday, 4 August. Lined up were six women, of whom half were regarded as being singularly unfeminine by their fellow athletes. Helen Stephens–the so-called Fulton Flash–was the favourite to win the race. Brought up on a farm in Missouri, the world record holder had endured a rough childhood which had seen her being raped when she was just nine by a sixteen-year-old relative, an experience that turned her away from men. Had this been common knowledge, then nobody would have suspected that she was a man, but because of her large and somewhat manly frame and her deep, husky voice, everybody assumed she was male. During the crossing on the
Manhattan
, Velma Dunn wrote to her mother that Stephens had given her ‘the surprise of my life'. ‘She is a huge girl, about 6ft tall and very large boned. She acts very mannish and talks lower than most men.' Stephens's low voice was perhaps not the function of some hormonal imbalance, but rather the result of a bizarre childhood accident. When she was about ten, she was playing with the family's pet dog–‘Doogie'–with a piece of wood carved into an arrowhead. Stephens held the wood in her mouth, tempting Doogie to snatch it from her. When the dog leaped towards her, Stephens jumped up to escape, but her foot caught on something and she tripped. The arrowhead lodged in her throat, puncturing her larynx. Her attempts to extricate the wood with a piece of string attached to it caused her immense agony, and the object
was subsequently removed in surgery. Stephens was mute for a month, but when her voice returned, it sounded like that of a large fifty-year-old man with a sixty-a-day cigarette habit.

Nevertheless, Stephens could do little to convince people she was anything but a man. Dorothy Odam recalled standing in the post office at the Friesian House, and hearing men's voices behind her. ‘You would turn round because there were not supposed to be any men there,' she said, ‘and it was Helen Stephens and Stella Walsh. She was definitely a man.' Stella Walsh's real name was Stanislawa Walasiewiczówna, a mouthful of ten syllables that had been pollarded into three since she moved to the United States when she was two years old. In 1932, she had won gold at the Los Angeles Olympics, although she had to compete under the flag of her native country, Poland, as the United States had not allowed her family to become American citizens. The third athlete who possessed some masculine qualities was Kathe Krauss, who was regarded as being a man by another of the 100 metres finalists, Marie Dollinger. Elfriede Kaun recalled how Dollinger said to her in 1986, ‘You know, I was the only woman in that race!' This is unfair on the other two competitors, Annette Rogers and Emmy Albus, both of whom were clearly women, but it is easy to see in photographs why Dollinger should have suspected Krauss of being a man.

Dollinger's comment may well have been inspired by her coming fourth in the final, beaten by the three ‘men'. As was predicted, Stephens won the race in a world record beating 11.5, which was disallowed because of a tail wind. Walsh came second in 11.7, and Krauss was third with 11.9. The three women certainly made a curious sight on the winner's podium, with the gigantically tall Krauss dominating the podium in her white tracksuit and doing a Nazi salute. Behind her, Stephens saluted in the traditional style, with her right hand raised to her right eyebrow, her left hand clutching the small oak tree that each of the gold medallists was given. Stella Walsh stood with her arms to her side. The truth about all these women's gender would be established only after the Games.

Stephens's manliness certainly did not stop her being admired by men, and by one man in particular–Adolf Hitler. After the victory ceremony, Stephens and Dee Boeckmann, the women's coach, were
approached by a short German official who sported a Hitlerian small toothbrush moustache. In a mixture of English and German, he asked the two women to ‘
Kommen Sie
', as the Fuehrer wished to meet the fastest woman in the world. Much to the official's chagrin, Boeckmann insisted that Stephens did her press interviews first, which the official endured nervously. He then ushered them into a small room behind Hitler's box, where they waited for a few minutes. Eventually, a dozen SS men entered the room through a pair of thick red curtains, and positioned themselves around the room, unbuttoning their holsters as they did so.

Two more SS men stepped into the room, and were immediately followed by Hitler, who was dressed in his brown military uniform complete with cap and black boots. He came towards Stephens and saluted. ‘It was sloppy,' she recalled, ‘like he didn't really want to give me one.' Stephens didn't return the salute, but instead held out her hand. Hitler took it, and Stephens gave Hitler what she described as a ‘good old Missouri handshake'. ‘I put extra pressure on it,' said Stephens, ‘and that gave him the wrong message because he immediately began to hug me and pinch me and squeeze me and see if I was real.' Hitler's physical familiarity unnerved her, but not enough to dissuade her from asking for an autograph. While Hitler was signing her book, a flashlight illuminated the room, causing a startled Hitler to jump into the air. ‘When he landed,' said Stephens, ‘fists flaying, he bellowed something like, “
Was fällt Ihnen ein
? Get him! Destroy the evidence!” ' Hitler then proceeded to slap the photographer around the face with his leather gloves, and even punched and kicked him. The camera was dropped, and Hitler kicked it hard against a wall. After the hapless photographer was manhandled out of the room by the SS Hitler turned back to Stephens, a smile on his face where there had earlier been a look of utter fury.

‘He wriggled his body as if to shake himself back into composure,' she recalled. Hitler then began to speak, his words interpreted by none other than Rudolf Hess, the Fuehrer's deputy and the third-most powerful man in Germany.

‘Fräulein should consider running for Germany. Fair hair, blue eyes. Strong, big woman. The Chancellor says you are a pure Aryan. Yes?'

‘
Nein danke
,' Stephens replied.

Hitler smiled before speaking through Hess once more.

‘You like Berlin better than Fulton homeland?'

‘Yes, Mr Hitler, Berlin's very, how do you say, nice, pretty?
Schoen
? Even in the rain.'

This time Hitler beamed, and then he made Stephens an extraordinary offer.

‘You would like to spend the next weekend with Chancellor Hitler at his villa in Berchtesgaden?'

It was at this point that Boeckmann interrupted the conversation, pointing out that the women's 4 x 100 metres relay final was due to take place at the weekend. Hitler did not seem to take this revelation seriously, and asked Boeckmann whether she too wanted to come to Berchtesgaden.

‘Thank you, but no,' she replied. ‘I too cannot accept your kind offer.'

Despite the reply being given in English, a wistful but light-hearted Hitler could tell that it was a refusal. He came up to Stephens and wished her well. ‘Then he reached behind me,' Stephens said, ‘pinched me, then saluted us both, and marched out.'

The next day, Stephens found that the photographer's camera had survived its kicking from the Fuehrer, for there were photographs of their extraordinary meeting being sold around the stadium.