Barney Ewell, the Sprinter War Cancelled Twice
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania produced one of the most unlucky and most resilient athletes of the twentieth century. Henry Norwood Ewell, known as Barney, was a world-class sprinter and long jumper who came of age in the late nineteen thirties, just in time for the Olympics to disappear.
The nineteen forty Games were cancelled because of World War Two. So were the nineteen forty-four Games. Ewell spent those peak years of his athletic life waiting, training, and maintaining a conditioning level that most competitors half his age could not sustain.
When the Olympics finally returned in London in nineteen forty-eight, Barney Ewell was thirty years old, an age when most sprinters are already retired. He not only competed, he tied the world record in the hundred-meter dash at the Olympic Trials, then went on to win a gold medal in the relay and two silver medals in London. It remains one of the most improbable Olympic careers on record.
