New Delhi: India’s tryst with the Olympics began in 1900, and it was a man with a contested identity who won the country its first medals — Norman Pritchard, who was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) when India was under British rule.
Pritchard is officially known to have taken part in the Paris Games in 1900, the second edition of the Summer Olympics, on an Indian passport and an Indian birth certificate.
The Paris Olympics saw him bring home silver medals in the 200-metre sprint and 200-metre hurdles events.
Pritchard was a man of many firsts. He was the first Asia-born athlete to earn an Olympic medal, the first Olympian to act in Hollywood (under the screen name Norman Trevor), and the first to score a hat-trick in an official football match on Indian soil in 1897.
The debate surrounding Pritchard’s identity lay dormant until 2000, exactly 100 years after his Olympic achievements, when British Olympic historian Ian Buchanan suggested that the medals earned by Pritchard should be credited to Great Britain since he was born in British India, according to a 2008 report in The Telegraph.
While not much is known about him, Pritchard is listed by the International Olympic Committee as an Indian.
British historians have pointed out that Pritchard was chosen for the British Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) championship (held in June 1900 and considered the British trials for the Olympic Games) but competed as an independent candidate.
Moreover, India only named its first official Olympic team after becoming a member of the International Olympic Committee in February 1920.
That year, Dorabji Tata, a prominent businessman in pre-Independence India, and George Lloyd, then governor of Bombay, created a committee to choose a five-person team to compete in the Antwerp Games in August and September, thus sending India’s first official contingent to the Olympics.
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Who was Norman Pritchard?
Pritchard was born in Calcutta to British parents on 23 April 1875, studied at St Xavier’s College, and began his sporting career in India before moving to England on business in 1905. He later relocated to the US to pursue a career as an actor.
Keith Morbey, a well-known English track historian and statistician, discovered Pritchard’s christening certificate in the India Office Records department of the British Library in London in 2005. His father’s occupation is described as ‘accountant’, and his residence is indicated as Alipore on the document, according to The Telegraph‘s report.
Pritchard was a regular at Calcutta sporting events even before he made it to the 1900 Olympics.
“Outside of the Olympics, probably his greatest athletic achievement was the 100-yard run on grass on February 18, 1899, in Calcutta as noted in Olympedia. Although official world records were not recognised until 1913, his timing of 9.8 seconds was equal to the world’s ‘best on record’ recorded by a number of American sprinters,” says the report.
Author and sports journalist Gulu Ezekiel, in a piece published by the BBC in 2018, notes that Pritchard was a versatile athlete, scored the first hat-trick in Indian football, excelled in rugby, and competed in a variety of track events.
Prior to the Paris Games, he was accepted into the London Athletic Club, and went on to win the club’s Challenge Cup in the 440-yard hurdles, as well as its trophies in the 100- and 120-yard hurdles. In the latter, he defeated the British AAA champion from 1897, writes Buchanan in The Journal of Olympic History.
Finally, Pritchard was up against American athletes training for the Paris Olympics in the AAA championship and, after his performance at the event — considered the qualifying round for Olympic squad selection — was “chosen to represent Great Britain at the Olympic Games”, writes Buchanan.
In the 1900 Games, he was placed second in both the 200-metre and 200-metre hurdles events, earning him two silver medals. In recognition, the French Olympic Committee presented him with a penknife.
He returned to India and at the age of 25, reportedly transitioned into sports administration and stopped actively participating in sports. He served as secretary of the Indian Football Association from 1900 to 1902, and left the country in 1905.
‘The Indian champion’
The Telegraph report notes that Pritchard was referred to as “the Indian champion” in an article in The Field magazine.
“The mystery over which country he was representing is deepened by the fact that in the competitions in England, his name was entered as a member of both the Bengal Presidency Athletic Club of India and the London Athletic Club,” says the report.
It adds that “it should be noted that of the nations that participated in the Paris Olympics, only a handful of countries had registered their National Olympic Committees. These did not include either India or Great Britain”.
The International Olympic Committee, in its archives and website, continues to credit Pritchard’s two medals to India.
From Olympian to actor
Pritchard went on to become the first Olympian to perform on stage in England and in Hollywood films under the screen name Norman Trevor.
“It was during a dinner, in December 1906 in London, that he (Pritchard) was asked to describe the magnificent durbar staged in Delhi in 1899 to welcome Lord Curzon as the Viceroy of India. So dramatic and vivid was his description of the incredible wealth and opulence on display that he was mistaken as an actor by Sir Charles Wyndham who was involved in the theatre. Sir Charles invited the young Pritchard to take up a bit role in a play, The Stronger Sex, at the Apollo Theatre in 1907,” The Telegraph report relates.
The play was a hit. On 15 September, 1914, Pritchard made his Broadway debut in the US with The Elder Son at the Playhouse Theatre.
The Telegraph report says that former Bengal cricket captain Raju Mukherji came across a write-up of Pritchard’s most famous Hollywood film, Beau Geste (1926), in St Xavier’s alumni magazine in 2002, and noticed the name Norman Trevor. He was listed in the magazine as having studied at St Xavier’s in 1891.
He went on to appear in 26 plays and 27 films, beginning with the silent film After Dark in 1915 and concluding with Tonight at Twelve in 1929, the year he died aged 54 of a “brain malady”. It was later suspected that he may have had Alzheimer’s disease.
Ezekiel’s BBC report states that according to the New York Times’ obituary on Pritchard, his daughter Dorothy had been single and living in New York when he died in California in 1929, and it remains a mystery what happened to her.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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