Claims to Fame

Fame is a funny thing. People we don’t know will win Olympic medals in Paris this summer and suddenly find themselves at the very centre of things. In an instant, they’ll have become famous — but what’s the point of fame if it doesn’t last?

Nothing had prepared Percy Williams for the transformative moment, measured in fractions of a second as a sprinter’s victory must be, when he became an Olympic champion and a Canadian hero at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. By now we’re used to the idea that fame is a highly desirable commodity, as if it were the motivating factor in athletic performance and the ultimate destination of human achievement. But when the shy, slight twenty-year-old from Vancouver won both the 100 metres and the 200 metres, sudden global attention felt more like a burden than like a reward.

It was the era of the amateur in track and field, when love of the sport was the basis of the ennobled Olympic endeavour and no one could dream of sustaining a...