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At every Olympics, spectators care a lot about the sprints. “In all sports,” the French Olympic Committee wrote in 1924, “pure speed is king.” That was why those Paris Games closed with the 100-meter freestyle sprint in Les Tourelles pool northeast of the city center.
The match-up had everything. Two Americans headlined the field: An exciting young challenger, who arrived in the U.S. with his parents when he was just a young child, faced a longtime champ, a Native Hawaiian. Barely 20 years old, Johnny Weissmuller was favored against 34-year-old Duke Kahanamoku. Both were tall, lean and strong, with large hands and feet. Both were charismatic and—there was no other word for it—beautiful.
And both were faster than any swimmers the world had yet seen.
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Since crashing onto the sporting scene at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, where he won gold and silver medals, Kahanamoku had held onto his title over other swimmers. John Kelii, Pua Kealoha, Norman Ross, his own brother—all had challenged him, but for 12 years he remained the Olympic champion. Then this Weissmuller kid from Chicago started breaking records. Was he the one who would dethrone the champ?
Few rooted against Kahanamoku. Often called the Ambassador of Aloha, he sailed through life with nothing but friends. Between races, he played his ukulele poolside and sang Hawaiian songs. It took grim determination to get angry with someone so friendly, even serene. On occasion, maybe too serene. At the 1912 Olympics, he had lounged away from the pool while his semifinal sprint went forward without him. Only a frenzied appeal by American officials won him a second chance to swim the race.
Kahanamoku rarely cared about the stopwatch. He swam to win. He took gold and silver medals at the Stockholm Games. After World War I washed out the next Olympics, Kahanamoku swept up two more gold medals at the 1920 Antwerp Games
Weissmuller, 14 years younger, was no flash in the pan. By 1924, he owned the world record for the 100-meter sprint. He embodied a new generation, radiating the energy, insouciance and power of the Roaring Twenties. Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey and football star Red Grange were transforming sports into big business and pioneering ways to cash in on public adulation.
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Bruce Wigo, a former longtime president of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, says that in the 1920s, “amateur sports received much more media coverage than they do today.” In an Associated Press survey in 1950, sportswriters and broadcasters overwhelmingly voted for Weissmuller as the outstanding swimmer of the half-century; indeed, he received more votes than all other swimmers combined. With Kahanamoku already a “huge celebrity,” Wigo adds, the two men were worthy rivals. Their coming duel was a compelling story.
The swimmers illustrated the complexity of American nationality. When Kahanamoku was born, Hawaiʻi was an independent kingdom. His family spoke Hawaiian at home. The United States then acquired the Pacific islands in 1898 through its own imperialist ambitions.
When Kahanamoku first swam on the mainland, some restaurants turned him away as a “negro” or an Indian. Kahanamoku laconically summarized that experience: “Friendliness was scarce.”
Press reports emphasized his dark skin, calling him “the brown brother,” “typically Hawaiian,” or the “Bronze Duke of Waikiki.” Sportswriters offered detailed inventories of Kahanamoku’s body that slid into the creepy; one described his chest muscles as “three times the thickness of the pectoral muscles of the average trained athlete,” like “a duck or a quail.”
Weissmuller was very white, yet still foreign, born to ethnic German parents in the Romanian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. German was his first language. A few months after Johnny’s birth, his parents set sail for the United States. His brother, Peter, was soon born in Pennsylvania, where their father worked as a coal miner before moving the family to Chicago. There, he opened a beer hall that failed. Years of drunken beatings ended when the father deserted the family.
Having been born abroad, Weissmuller was not a citizen, so was technically ineligible for the U.S. Olympic team of 1924. To compete in Paris, he pretended to be a citizen by assuming his younger brother’s birthday and birthplace. To reinforce the deception, someone clumsily falsified Peter’s baptismal record by inserting “John” as the baby’s supposed middle name. (Johnny Weissmuller never publicly admitted the deception.)
The young Weissmuller dropped out of school and found work when he was 12. Since his mother had put water wings on him for a dip in Lake Michigan, however, his passion had been swimming. To swim year-round, he joined the YMCA, attended swimming school and entered every race he could find.
At 16, he auditioned for the Illinois Athletic Club. Despite crude form, he flew through the water. A year later, Weissmuller was claiming world records. A legendary aquatics coach at Stanford University marveled at him: “Never sick. Never tired. He is a superhuman.”
The young Chicagoan set his sights on “the Duke.” To be the fastest man in the water, he had to beat Kahanamoku.
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The rivals swam a hundred meters in roughly a minute, a time that would barely register at high school swim meets today. Their swimsuits extended to mid-thigh and featured shoulder straps; it was like swimming with an anchor around your middle. But no one in their world swam faster than they did.
Kahanamoku had taught himself how to swim. At age 4, his father dropped him into the water from a canoe. “It was save yourself or drown,” he remembered.
On most days, living on Waikiki Bay on Oahu, he swam or canoed, played water polo and volleyball. He surfed, the pastime of Hawaiian kings, and dived for coins thrown by tourists. He quit high school after one semester, preferring days on Waikiki, sometimes racing against friends and his many brothers.
In races, Kahanamoku usually trailed his rivals for the first few strokes, then surged ahead by the halfway point. If his lead expanded, he usually eased up.
Surfing gave him a thrill like no other.. “On a board,” he said, “I feel like the boss man. I’m in charge when I make the big wave do what I want.” Harnessing the sea’s power thrilled him. “With my board,” he said, “I feel like I own the ocean, and I am a king.”
Over time, due to his Olympic successes, Kahanamoku would become Hawaii’s leading human tourist attraction. When cruise ships arrived, celebrities rushed to Waikiki to meet him, including automotive industry heir Edsel Ford; movie stars Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Groucho Marx; Babe Ruth; the sons of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt . He taught the Prince of Wales to surf. In the 1960s, he even showed England’s Queen Mother how to hula.
Back in 1921, though, Weissmuller was stalking Kahanamoku. In September of that year, at Brighton Beach in New York, the 17-year-old posted the fastest 100-meter freestyle time yet, one of 67 world records he would set. Swimming fans and pundits embraced the young star. A clamor rose for a head-to-head match with Kahanamoku.
Weissmuller took aim at the 1922 national championships in Honolulu, eager to challenge Kahanamoku in his home waters. Kahanamoku ducked him, choosing instead to sail to California for swim exhibitions and movie auditions. Even without Kahanamoku competing against him, Weissmuller dropped the world record to 58.6 seconds in a California meet that summer.
In 1923, a strained heart muscle sidelined Weissmuller. That set the stage for their first head-to-head duel in June 1924, at the Indianapolis tryouts for the Paris Olympics. Kahanamoku could not duck that one.
Anticipation built through the preliminary heats as the champ and the challenger each cruised into the finals. In that race, every sprinter false-started except for the calm veteran from Waikiki. Kahanamoku waited as the other swimmers scrambled out of the water for a second try. The Hawaiian nailed that start while Weissmuller dived awkwardly.
Pools in 1924 had no lines painted on the floor, so the swimmers held their heads out of the water for much of the race to see where they were going. Straining hard, Weissmuller nevertheless swam into a lane marker near the race’s end. Despite that and his poor start, the technical hiccups didn’t matter; he won by ten feet.
Kahanamoku, some still insisted, was as good as ever and would win in Paris. The U.S. swimming team elected the Hawaiian as its captain by a wide margin over Weissmuller. Sentiment, however, could not reverse what stopwatches showed.
In Paris, French spectators besieged the young swimming idol, yet Weissmuller seemed immune to pressure. Between races at the Les Tourelles pool, he staged comedy acts with Harold “Stubby” Kruger, another swimmer from Hawaii.
As the straight man in the act, Weissmuller performed classic dives from the ten-meter platform. Kruger followed each perfect dive with a slapstick plunge, squeezing his eyes shut, or wearing clown makeup, or madly pumping his legs in midair. Parisian audiences roared with laughter and demanded encores, disrupting the racing schedule. Olympic rules were swiftly revised to bar such appalling fun from future Games.
As the swimmers lined up to start, Kahanamoku wished Weissmuller luck. “The most important thing in this race,” he said, pointing at the poles that would display each medalist’s national flag, “is to get the American flag up there three times.” Weissmuller nodded his agreement.
The contest was a replay of the Indianapolis race, but with a clean start. Weissmuller finished 2.4 seconds ahead of Kahanamoku; at one point he looked backward to confirm his lead. Kahanamoku's younger brother Sam took the bronze medal. The French Olympic Committee proclaimed the new champion’s “indisputable superiority.”
Weissmuller won gold twice more in Paris along with a bronze medal for water polo, then added two golds at the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928. He retired from competitive swimming at age 24.
Kahanamoku, meanwhile, sought to swim at the next two Games but did not qualify for either. The 1932 water polo team listed him as an alternate, but he never played in a match.
Kahanamoku spent much of the 1920s trying to build a movie career on his charisma, good looks and athletic triumphs. He landed bit parts, portraying dark-skinned characters who never got the girl. He pithily summarized his movie career years later: “I played chiefs—Polynesian chiefs, Aztec chiefs, Indian chiefs. All kinds of chiefs.”
What Hollywood wanted, though, was Johnny Weissmuller, who was just as big, just as handsome and irreproachably white. In 1932, just before the Los Angeles Games, his debut in Tarzan the Ape Man was a box office smash. Weissmuller would star in 11 more Tarzan films and over a dozen movies as Jungle Jim, and he enjoyed a single season in a television series. For 40 years, his fans constantly begged him to repeat his trademark Tarzan yell. He usually complied, often in restaurants.
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Weissmuller enjoyed his cinematic success. “It was like stealing,” he said. “There was swimming in it, and I didn’t have much to say.”
When journalist Ernie Pyle passed through Hawaii during World War II, he noted Kahanamoku’s special place in the islands: “There is something almost of reverence toward Duke. His character and conduct have been so near perfect that he has become almost symbolic of old Hawaii.”
Across the years, Kahanamoku and Weissmuller remained friends. In 1955, the Hawaiian achieved one distinction never equaled by his onetime rival: He appeared in an Oscar-nominated movie, Mister Roberts.
He portrayed a chief.