In one week, the 2024 Summer Olympics begin in Paris. USC will send many athletes to France in search of gold medals and athletic glory. USC is a football school, but USC is also an Olympic powerhouse. The greatest sports streak at USC could be the football team’s 34-game winning streak from the middle of the 2003 season up to the 2006 Rose Bowl against Texas. It could also be the run of five straight College World Series championships from 1970 through 1974. Yet, there’s another USC sports streak which currently sits at 112 years and is likely to last for a long time to come.
Here’s the streak: USC has produced a Summer Olympic gold medalist in every edition of the Summer Games going back to 1912 in Stockholm. USC should get at least one gold medal in Paris. It should definitely get a gold medal in 2028 when the Summer Olympics come back home to Los Angeles for the third time. We are looking at a streak which is likely to last at least 120 years and will probably continue well into the middle of the 21st century.
Who began this streak? Glad you asked:
Fred Kelly was a Southern California kid through and through. A native of Beaumont and a product of Orange High School, Kelly attended USC and pursued the Olympics at a point in time when the event was a mere 16 years old. The 1912 Stockholm Olympics were merely the fifth modern Summer Games ever held. The Winter Olympics were 12 years away from being born, and no one knew at the time that these 1912 Olympics would be the last until 1920 due to World War I, which was just around the corner.
One legend was formed at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics: Jim Thorpe, on par with Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, won both the pentathlon AND decathlon in their Olympic debuts. The enormity and resonance of Thorpe’s achievement remain intact 109 years after the fact… but don’t let that obscure or overshadow what Fred Kelly started for USC.
Kelly and American Olympic teammate James Wendell created a slight degree of separation late in the 110-meter hurdles final. It is often the case that in a sprint race, the runner who displays the combination of timing and instinct needed to lean forward at the very end — creating forward-moving body momentum without prematurely sacrificing speed — wins the race. Sprinters know they can’t think about leaning into the tape too early; if they do that, another runner will rush by them. The timing has to be exquisite.
Kelly mastered the final forward lean and nipped Wendell by one tenth of a second.
That was USC’s first Olympic gold medal
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