Shamrocks in the Greek Isles: Billy Sherring's Olympic Journey, and Mine

Abstract

Shamrocks in the Greek Isles:Billy Sherring's Olympic Journey, and Mine Jim Smyth It is a truism that one is never far from some reminder of Ireland, or indeed, from an Irish person. In 2009, while visiting my friend Veronique, who then ran a fabulously cluttered antique shop on the Greek island of Hydra in the Aegean Sea, a colored lithograph caught my eye. The image is of a moustachioed Greek, in full national costume. The Greek was shaking the hand of a slightly built man in shorts and singlet, as a winged angel lowered a victory wreath onto his head. The inscription, in French and Greek, identified the Greek as Spyridon Louis, the winner of the marathon race in the first modern Olympics of 1896. The other person is identified as M. D. Sherring of Canada, the winner of the same race at the 1906 Olympics. (Misidentified, I would later learn: the initials M. D. are erroneous. Sherring's first name was William and he was usually simply called Billy.) Naturally, I bought it. But for me, Irish born, a sometime exile, and now living back in Ireland, the more fascinating question was, Why was Sherring wearing a singlet emblazoned with a large shamrock? Like many of my fellow residents of Ireland, I take an interest in sports, and I can claim a strong family connection with the Gaelic Athletic Association. (Actually, my family's relationship with sport is rather fraught. The Fenian P.J. Nally, after whom the Nally Stand in Croke Park is named, is a close relation. In 1920, my father was in the park on Bloody Sunday as a young child. My father was an all-round athlete and expelled from the GAA for playing soccer to which his response was, "I play a lot more tennis than soccer; is tennis not a foreign game? Expel me for that.") But I am also a sociologist: when I look at a sporting event, I cannot help but also take note of the social contexts and the shaping history that accompany it. Over the past decade-and-a-half, the lithograph that I picked up in the Greek isles has spurred me to learn much more about the history of competitive racing, worldwide, and more, too, about the enigmatic athlete with a shamrock on his chest. I found myself consulting books I might never have [End Page 9] encountered otherwise: Kevin McCarty's Gold Silver and Green (2010), David Martin and Roger Gynn's The Olympic Marathon (2000), and Robin Water-field's Olympia: The Story of the Ancient Olympic Games (2018). It's also sent me trawling through the sports pages of newspapers from the turn of the twentieth century, and—with the help of Marie Claude Klein, without whom I never would have been able to decipher the handwriting and aristocratic French of Baron de Coubertin—to read yellowing letters from the inception of the modern games. And still, the mystery of Billy Sherring continues to pique my curiosity. ________ The marathon race in the first modern Olympics in 1896 was the climax of the games. This is all the more bizarre because, although the organizers of the first modern Olympic games believed they were reviving competitions that had been in abeyance for millennia, there was no such run in the ancient games. Nonetheless, the "revival" gave the race an almost instant global popularity. Other road races sprung up in Europe and North America. The Boston Marathon, first run a year later in 1897, quickly became a national institution. To the west and slightly farther north, in the Canadian town of Hamilton, Ontario, the Around Round the Bay Race was already well established. It was first run in 1894, and continues today as an annual event—the oldest long-distance race in North America. Hamilton, at the time, was not many decades removed from it frontier origins. It was certainly on the cusp of change. Like most cities in the former British North America, the town was run by a predominantly English establishment who controlled the city council and almost all of the businesses. A large Irish community, swollen by waves of immigrants in...