CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — At the 1924 Paris Olympics, former University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign track star Harold Osborn won two gold medals, in the high jump and the decathlon, making him the first (and still the only) athlete to win the decathlon and another individual event in the same Olympics.
One hundred years after Osborn won his gold medals, two of his grandsons will travel to Paris for the 2024 Olympic Games. They’ll wear t-shirts with his name and watch the opening ceremonies and the decathlon. Another Illinois athlete will be competing in Paris this summer in one of the same events as Osborn. High jumper Rose Yeboah will compete for her home country of Ghana.
The University Archives is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Osborn’s accomplishments. The Osborn family donated his papers and memorabilia, including his 1924 gold medals, to the Student Life and Culture Archives. Two of Osborn’s daughters — Elizabeth Osborn of Champaign and Susan Jones of Bloomington, Indiana — will talk about their father’s life and athletic career in a July 25 webinar hosted by the Archives.
“I regret that he didn’t get this attention when he was alive, but he didn’t want attention. He competed for the love of trying to be the best you could be,” Elizabeth Osborn said.
Osborn, a 1922 Illinois graduate, was a U. of I. track and field athlete from 1920-22 and part of the inaugural U. of I. Athletics Hall of Fame class in 2017. He won 17 national titles and set six world records during his career, and he still holds the world record in the standing high jump. He was a charter member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
The collection at the Archives includes a wool track jersey that Osborn wore at the 1928 Olympics, where he narrowly missed medaling in the high jump; a pair of his track shoes; Olympic diplomas documenting his victories at the 1924 Games; certificates from other track meets, including Olympic qualifying events; newspaper clippings and photographs; and Osborn’s “black book,” in which he kept detailed records of the meets in which he competed, including exhibition meets in towns throughout Illinois, such as Rantoul, Mahomet, Arcola and Bement.
“It had to have been for the love of the sport because he wasn’t getting any money for it,” Jones said.
Osborn never talked about his accomplishments with his family, and while growing up, his four daughters knew almost nothing about their father’s career as a world-class athlete, Jones and Elizabeth Osborn said. Their father displayed his Olympic diplomas in the waiting room of his osteopathic medicine practice, and a few items he won became household knickknacks. But most of his memorabilia, including the gold medals, were kept in a trunk in the attic. The sisters named the attic alcove the “trophy club,” where they and other neighborhood children played with Osborn’s trophies.
Jones and Elizabeth Osborn remember their father traveling to track meets all over the country, sometimes with their elder sister Roberta, now deceased. He was an assistant coach for the U. of I. track team in the 1940s and an avid supporter of the Champaign (now Central) High School football and basketball programs. The sisters said coaches and athletes were frequent visitors in their home, including Illinois football, basketball and track athlete Dwight “Dike” Eddleman, Illinois pole vaulter Bob Richards, and high school coaches Tommy Stewart and Lee Cabutti.
“He was an amateur athlete, and he really loved amateur athletes,” Elizabeth Osborn said.
In addition to Harold Osborn’s athletic memorabilia, the collection includes items from his wife Margaret Bordner Osborn, a 1932 Illinois graduate. In the late 1980s, she donated many of her husband’s papers documenting his athletic career. After her death in 2003, her daughters found a shoebox full of love letters that Harold wrote to her, many of them from Europe where he was competing in 1925. They donated the letters and a beaded flapper dress that Margaret bought in Paris on a 1927 study abroad trip.
One of the letters to Margaret was addressed “to the one more precious than gold.” The letters not only document their courtship; they also chronicle the places Osborn competed, including at meets in the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia.
The family donated more of Osborn’s mementos in 2022, including the medals, diplomas, jersey and track shoes. Jones, who attended the U. of I. as did her three sisters, has advocated for preserving her father’s memorabilia at the Archives.
The items are exactly the kind of materials the Student Life and Culture Archives collects, said Ellen Swain, the archivist for student life and culture. It documents the history and traditions of student life and culture through alumni and student papers, including diaries, scrapbooks, correspondence, and photographs; student organization records; oral histories; and student publications.
The Osborn collection can help researchers understand sports history and the experiences of student-athletes at the U. of I., and it complements other materials the Archives holds that support research into the Olympics, including the papers of Illinois alumnus Avery Brundage, who served as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee, Swain said.
“It’s been a really nice relationship with the Osborn family, working to make it more accessible,” she said. “You can see how much they care about the legacy and history. It’s really a testament to them it’s all been saved and taken care of so well.”