by Orrin Konheim

Created on: November 12, 2008   Last Updated: December 19, 2008

Because there are so many track and field athletes to cover, I will only stick to the male athletes and in another edition, I might write about the female athletes as well. Although one can never really compare one athletic hero to another, here is an effort at a ranked list of Olympic heroes in the sport of track and field with a U.S.-centric bent:

1. Joe Thorpe-USA-Decathlon/Pentathlon (1912)-Whether he was quite possibly the greatest athlete of his day in any sport is not a particularly hard question to answer, considering he was able to dominate in track and field and go onto successfully play professional baseball and football. In high school, Thorpe single-handedly won track and field championships for his teams by winning nearly every event he entered and was a star athlete in football as well. Among the best in the world, he came close to besting individual specialists in their events while being a jack-of-all-trades, qualifying for the finals of both the long jump and high jump and finishing one spot away from medaling in the latter. It's no wonder that the King of Sweden declared him the best athlete in the world when he awarded him his medal.

2. Jesse Owens-USA-Sprinting/Jumping (1936)-His story is so well-known already, there's no need to retell it in detail. Essentially, he was able to spurn Hitler's idea of a master race by foiling the Germans in four seperate events to become the most decorated athlete on the track in Berlin.

3. Paavo Nurmi-Finland-Distance (1920-1928)-The flying Finn won nine gold medals which was tied for the most ever until Michael Phelps came along. His competitiveness and dominance at the distance events were legendary. Perhaps nothing better explains his talent than his performance in the now-cancelled cross-country race in Paris Olympics of 1924. The race was poorly planned on an unusually difficult course that came in the vicinity of an energy plant that leaked out poisionous fumes. Over half the runners in the field did not finish the course and many were hospitalized, and Nurmi emerged physically unscathed and nearly two minutes ahead of the field.

4. Carl Lewis-USA-Sprinting/Jumping (1984-1996)-Flamboyant, comeptetive and nearly unstoppable, Lewis was the first man to repeat Jesse Owens' four-gold performance in Berlin but managed to follow it up with an additional five golds over the next three Olympics trying him for the most Gold medals ever. His most dramatic came 12 years after his initial performace in Atlanta where

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