“Swifter, Higher, Stronger!” New Era, Sept. 1981, 31
Swifter, Higher, Stronger!
Adapted from an address given August 5, 1980, at the LDS Scout Encampment at the Deseret Ranches in Florida.
“I choose not to be an ordinary man. It is my right to be uncommon if I can”
Few scenes inspire more awe than the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. In a gigantic stadium, thousands of fans cheer as a parade of athletes circles the track. Flags of more than a hundred nations wave. Color and spectacle bedazzle the eye. Hundreds of pigeons are released, symbolizing peace. Cannons roar. Then a runner, bearing a torch initially ignited by the sun’s rays in Olympia, Greece, trots into the stadium and sets the Olympic flame ablaze.
Every competitor hopes to win a gold medal. Those who do attain that high honor may notice three words that are inscribed on every Olympic award: “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” In English that means, “Swifter, Higher, Stronger.” Since the Olympics began, that has been their story. The records broken and the gains in human achievement accomplished can be summarized by those three words—three words that denote man’s eternal quest for improvement—Citius, Altius, Fortius: Swifter, Higher, Stronger.
How well we are living up to that motto is demonstrated by both Olympic and world sports records. In the 1920s, Johnny Weissmuller was called the greatest swimmer in history. Prior to the Olympics he set world records in 67 different events. In the games of 1924 and 1928, he won five gold medals each time. Today, his world records are being broken by teenage girls.
For years, it was felt that no man could run a mile in less than four minutes. Again and again, athletes broke themselves in the attempt to better that time, until Roger Bannister, an English medical student, amazed the world by clocking a 3:59.4 mile at Oxford on May 6, 1954. Since then, dozens have shattered the old belief of man’s limited capacity. Among them was a young high school boy, Jim Ryun, who ran the race in 3:59, yet finished eighth in a field of more experienced competitors. Ryun himself has now run the mile in less than 4:00 almost 20 times, and the new world record, held by Steve Ovett of Great Britain, is an unbelievable 3:48.8!
The ultimate distance for the shot put was supposed to be 60 feet. Parry O’Brien ended that myth in the 1956 Olympics, and now the world record is 72 feet 2 1/4 inches. At the first modern-day Olympics, held in 1896 in Greece, the gold medal winner threw the discus 95 feet 7 1/2 inches. The world record today is 232 feet 6 inches.
When I was young, Bob Richards pole vaulted 15 feet, an incredible feat. At the Moscow Olympics last year, six men broke the Olympic record of 18 feet 1/2 inch before Poland’s Wlydslaw Kozakiewicz cleared 18 feet 11 1/2 inches, the first time in 60 years that a world record was set in the Olympic pole vault—and Kozakiewicz’s second of three misses at 19 feet 1 1/4 inches would have cleared 19 feet!
The performance of these athletes really makes the words Citius, Altius, Fortius come to life. But what makes a champion? What produces a man who stands on the top step of the victory pedestal after running swifter, soaring higher, or demonstrating more strength than anyone has exhibited before? I believe the same qualities that apply to athletic champions also apply to champions in any endeavor in life.
Desire
After all is said and done, nothing works unless we do! Bannister, after breaking the four-minute barrier, defined desire as “the ability to take more out of yourself than you’ve got.” During the race in which he broke the records, he ordered himself, “Roger, you’re going to run if you have to run on your knees.” Bob Zuppke, a successful coach at Illinois University, believes there is always a little more to give. “If you ran as far and as fast and as long as you could, and sank to the ground in utter exhaustion, and you looked up and saw a big lion standing there, you could run some more, couldn’t you?” he asked.
Athletes train in pain because they are aware that in the race it’s going to hit them and they’ll have to drive through it. Strange as it may seem, those athletes will tell you that when you go through hurt, you achieve power. It hurts to stretch your lungs, to stretch your muscles. But when you do it, the next time you have more capacity and more power. It’s the same way in life.
George T. Johannesen, Sr., of the Kalamazoo Ward, Lansing Michigan Stake, tells a story of his college classmate, Pete Cavallo, who wanted nothing more than to earn his letter, even though he was barely five feet tall and weighed scarcely more than a hundred pounds. Cavallo (the name means “horse”) decided to try cross-country running.
The first year, Pete finished the race, but only long after the stadium was empty. The next year he did a little better, and by the third year he had improved enough to finish while spectators were still left in the stands. By the fourth year, people were saying, “Sure do wish those little Cavallo legs could make it this year!” But nobody thought they would.
Still, there was an aura of expectancy. All eyes were on the hill leading to the stadium, hoping to see Pete Cavallo at the front of the pack of runners as they made the final dash to the stadium. Then one of those big, long-legged runners charged into view, and a sigh of disappointment went up. Fans started leaving.
But suddenly there was little Pete driving over the hill. The stadium became pandemonium, everyone shouting, “Come on Pete! Come on, Little Horse!” The winner was forgotten as if Pete had come in first. And perhaps in a way he did, because people still remember today his example of working to do the best he could.
Individual Effort
The most outstanding example of individual effort that I know of is embodied in the college career of Jim Thorpe. Of Lamanite ancestry, he attended Carlisle Indian School. There he compiled a record that has never been approached. He was a halfback on the football team and was such a hard runner that for fun he would tell the other team which way he was coming. When his team had to punt, he could boot the ball 70 yards.
One year little Carlisle upset mighty Harvard, with Thorpe kicking four field goals and scoring a touchdown. Another time against Army, he scored two touchdowns, kicked three field goals and three extra points, and passed for another touchdown. He returned one Army kick 90 yards for a touchdown, but it was called back on a penalty. So Thorpe returned the next kickoff 95 yards!
In track and field, Carlisle faced a tough dual meet with unbeaten powerhouse Lafayette. Jim Thorpe showed up for the meet accompanied by one other man. Since Lafayette had a squad of 48 athletes, an official said, “You mean the two of you are the whole Carlisle team?”
“Nope,” said Thorpe. “Just me. The other fellow’s the student manager.”
Against Lafayette that day, Thorpe won the high jump, broad jump, shotput, discus, 120-yard hurdles, 220-yard hurdles, and finished third in the 100-yard dash. Carlisle won the meet 71–41.
Harold Connolly had broken his left arm several times. It was only two-thirds the size of his right. To exercise and build up the smaller arm, he began throwing the hammer back to Boston College’s regular throwers. Soon he was tossing it back farther than they were throwing it, so he entered the event. He later broke the world record and won a gold medal. He made himself strongest where he was weakest.
“Not everyone can be a champ—not everyone can be an athlete,” boxer Joe Frazier said. “But everyone can do his best to try to make something of himself.”
Faith in Self
World records are often made before the race is run.
“Somebody’s going to break the world record in the 200-meter backstroke,” predicted Jed Graef, an American swimmer at the 1964 Olympics. And who might that be? “Me!” said Graef. And he broke the record.
At the unofficial 1906 games in Athens, Greece, an Austrian weightlifter, Josef Steinbach, was booed by the partisan crowd because it was alleged he was a professional. The frustrated Austrian left the stadium, allowing the Greek in second place to win the event. The flag was run up, the crowd cheered. Then Steinbach reentered the stadium, walked up to the weight the winner had lifted with great effort, and with ease hoisted it three times over his head.
In 1952, super-athlete Emil Zatopek of Czechoslovakia won both the 10,000 and 5,000-meter races. To celebrate his victory, he announced he would enter the marathon, even though he had never run the 26-mile event before.
“Do you really think you can win?” a newsman asked.
“If I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t have entered,” Zatopek replied.
At the 15-mile mark, Zatopek was side-by-side with Jim Peters of Great Britain, the prerace favorite.
“Don’t you think we should be going a bit faster?” Zatopek asked, then took off. He was grinning when he broke the tape.
Running back Floyd Little of the Denver Broncos summed up self-confidence: “I choose not to be an ordinary man. It is my right to be uncommon if I can.”
Honesty
In the ancient Greek games, any participant who broke the rules or tried to bribe a judge was forced to pay a fine and had to build a statue of himself, inscribing on it his name and the nature of the offense. Such statues were called zanes. Perhaps the most astonishing fact of the ancient games is that only 13 zanes were built during a thousand years. But there are other ways to be honest in sports besides avoiding cheating.
In tournament golf competition, there is a rule that a contestant must be disqualified if he signs an incorrect scorecard or turns his card in without signing it. Gary Player did that once and was eliminated from a prestigious tournament. He was asked if someone in the scoring tent couldn’t have reminded him to sign.
“My friend,” Player replied, “there are responsibilities in life. You cannot shove your responsibilities onto the shoulders of someone else. This was my responsibility. I failed to meet it, so I must suffer the consequences.”
At the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Hitler declared that Aryans were a master race. America had 10 black athletes, who, much to Hitler’s chagrin, scored more points than any national team. Chief among them was Jesse Owens. At the opening ceremonies, Hitler refused to greet Owens and deliberately snubbed the blacks. Owens simply shrugged, “I didn’t come over to shake hands with Hitler, anyway.” Owens then battled to four gold medals. As he broke the world’s record for the running broad jump, the first to greet him was not a fellow team member but an exuberant German competing in the same event, Luz Long.
“I never see anything like this. You are the greatest of all!” Long exclaimed in broken English.
As Owens took Long’s hand in both of his and squeezed it, the crowd thundered approval. Then the two competitors wrapped their arms about one another and began to walk toward the track. The crowd—in spite of Hitler’s presence—went wild with joy and shouted for many minutes.
In 1932, Lauri Lehtinen of Finland was favored to win the 5,000-meter run. An American named Hill challenged Lehtinen on the home stretch, bringing the crowd to its feet. As Hill moved to pass, Lehtinen swerved into his path. Hill tried to pass on the other side, and Lehtinen blocked his path again and forced the American to break stride. Hill barely missed catching Lehtinen at the wire.
The fans booed so long and loud that officials held up naming the winner for more than an hour. But since there was nothing illegal about the blocking, they declared the Finn the winner.
As Lehtinen mounted the victory stand’s top step, an enormous chorus of boos erupted. When the olive wreath was placed on his head, Lehtinen removed it, stepped down, and placed the wreath on Hill’s head.
Discipline
“Cut out of your lives the things which keep you from doing your best,” said Dean Cromwell, an Olympic track coach.
Bill Bradley, an all-American from Princeton and former pro basketball player who is now a U.S. senator, said, “You just have to develop self-discipline, a self-discipline that makes you practice in one spot until you make 25 baskets from that spot, a self-discipline that makes you get up on Sunday morning and go to church instead of sacking in.”
Wade Bell, a Mormon half-miler who ran in the Olympics, said, “Track is a proving ground. It’s a place where my mind can make my body do something it doesn’t want to do; where I can say I did ten 440s today in 60 seconds each; that the last four were so hard I thought my legs would drop off, but that my mind kept me going.”
Too few are willing to pay the price to achieve greatness—in anything.
Expect Some Failure
After winning a silver medal in the 1960 Olympic 400-meter hurdles in Rome, Cliff Sushman fell in the 1964 Olympic trials and missed a chance for Tokyo. Several fans in his hometown wrote to Cliff expressing sympathy. His reply:
“Don’t feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for some of you.
“In a split second all the many years of training, pain, sweat, blisters, and agony of running were simply and irrevocably wiped out. But I tried. I would much rather fall knowing I had put forth an honest effort than never to have tried at all. … Each of you is capable of trying to make your own personal Olympic team, whether it be a high school football team, the glee club, the honor roll, or whatever your role may be. Unless your reach exceeds your grasp, how can you be sure what you can attain?
“… Certainly I was disappointed in falling flat on my face. However, there is nothing I can do about it now but get up, pick the cinders from my wounds, and take one more step, followed by one more and one more, until the steps turn into miles and the miles into success.
“I know that I may never make it. The odds are against me, but I have something in my favor—desire and faith.
“Some of you have never known the satisfaction of doing your best in sports, the joy of excelling in class, the wonderful feeling of completing the job and looking back on it knowing you have done your best.
“… There is plenty of room at the top, but no room for anyone to sit down.”
Bounce Back
Karoly Takacs, a Hungarian, was recognized as the best pistol shot in the world. More than anything he wanted to win in the Olympics. But one day driving home, Takacs was in a crash, and doctors had to amputate his right arm—his shooting arm.
Takacs’s recovery was slow. It wasn’t a physical challenge, but an emotional one. He had hit bottom. People wanted to help but there was little they could do. Takacs began to avoid his friends; even his family didn’t know where he spent his time. But Karoly Takacs was preparing. In solitude he had trained his left arm and his aiming eye, a training that’s far more of an intellectual mastery than most people realize. By the next Olympics, Takacs was ready.
When the pistol event was over, this one-armed Hungarian stood, the cheers rising about him, on the topmost step of the winner’s platform with a gold medal around his neck.
Takacs showed us something more than his ability to shoot. He proved that human beings have a largely untapped comeback capacity. He discovered for himself the exciting fact that hitting bottom does not mean defeat, but that it just signals the end of downward movement. As one friend told me, “The bottom can be something to bounce on.”
Teamwork
“You can’t clap with one hand,” the Chinese proverb says. In the human equation, one plus one does not equal two, it equals eleven. There is strength in unity.
At the NCAA track meet held at Brigham Young University in June 1967, four men from the University of Southern California lowered the world record for the 440-yard relay by one full second. The time of 38.6 seconds for 440 yards becomes remarkable when compared to 9.1 seconds, the world’s fastest time for the 100-yard dash. Each member of USC’s winning team averaged 8.7 seconds per 100 yards!
The joint actions of individuals working together can increase effectiveness. Life is a cooperative venture. It requires chiefs and Indians. It requires compromise with one another to get along. And it requires unselfish charity for our fellowman.
Faith in God
A true champion, after giving his all, calls on God for extra help.
Cathy Ferguson, 17, was struggling in the backstroke event, six inches behind the leader. She could hardly feel her arms and legs, but kept battling—nine yards, eight, seven, six. She kept hanging on, digging in, until she pushed through to win. In that moment of glory, she could hardly control her tears, but she said, “I just kept praying, ‘Please God, help me keep going.’”
Fred Hansen, nervous and worried because he was behind in the pole vault, stopped during the heat of competition to read a letter from his father, reminding him that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa. 40:31). The next jump Fred soared over the crossbar to set a new Olympic record.
Gil Dodds, an American miler, felt that moment of absolute fatigue, pain, and agony when his legs felt like lead in a crucial race. As he fought off the desire to quit, he prayed earnestly, “Lord, you pick them up and I’ll lay them down.” He won the race.
Championship Material
Although most of us will never participate in the Olympic games, the Olympic motto and the Olympic spirit should have deep significance for Latter-day Saints, a people who believe in eternal progression. These ideals should provide us with a motivation to strive constantly to improve our performance in all aspects of our lives—to do our best, lengthen our stride, to truly become champions.
You, my young friends, are sons and daughters of God. If you’ll have sufficient faith in yourselves as children of God, and live so that he can bless you and enlarge you, he will do anything you ask him to do in righteousness. If you will give yourself to the effort of making a useful life for yourself and rendering service to your fellowman, the Lord will help you. He knows your potential and can help you develop it until you can race swifter, higher, and stronger than you ever dreamed possible.
1954—Roger Bannister slashes the tape at Oxford, England, becoming the first man to break the four-minute mile
1912—Jim Thorpe wins both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm, Sweden
1971—Joe Frazier blasts Muhammad Ali in a unanimous 15-round bout at Madison Square Garden in New York
1936—Jesse Owens races to a 400-yard relay victory in a dual U.S.-Great Britain meet in London