PARIS (WOOD) — For Steve Huneryager and his family, the Paris Games was a bucket list event.
A hundred years ago, Huneryager’s grandfather, Harold Osborn, won two Olympic gold medals at La Stade de Colomb in the high jump and the decathlon.
“As I got older, I said, ‘This is really, really cool and I want to be at the hundredth anniversary of his Olympics,'” he said.
To this day, he’s still the only decathlete to win two medals in the same games.
“I think he died in 1975. I was 15 years old, and, you know, I didn’t really know. He did not talk about the Olympics all that much and what he did. He was a very humble guy,” Huneryager said.
His family is more than happy to boast about his accomplishments. Huneryager paraded around France with a commemorative shirt and stopped by the stadium where it all happened — which is still standing and in use.
The ’24 Games are among the greatest in Olympic history, immortalized by the movie Chariots of Fire. Osborn knew all the main characters.
“Charles Paddock, I think, was the sprinter who was in that movie,” Huneryager said. “You know, they have letters back and forth. Back then they took a boat over so they got to know each other quite well.”
Paddock, Eric Lidell, Paavo Nurmi and Johnny Weismuller were the stars of the 1924 Games, but in his own quiet way, so was Osborn.
“He’s pretty much unknown … o I do take a lot of pride, and I like to brag about it a bit,” Huneryager said.
He takes great pride in his grandfather’s legacy. Back in his hometown in Illinois, he still has some of his Olympic memorabilia: team jacket and cuff links. He used to have the gold medals, but those have been given to Osborn’s alma mater, the University of Illinois, where they’re being put on display.
