ALABAMA'S FIRST OLYMPIC MEDALIST

AT THE 1932 LOS ANGELES OLYMPICS, Edwin Yancey Argo, a thirty-six-year-old military horseman from Hollins, Alabama, turned in a crucial performance in the equestrian Three-Day Event that won the Americans a Team Gold. Since then, more than fifty Alabamians have competed in the Olympics, winning more than thirty medals, but Argo's Gold was the first. For the United States, it was the first gold medal in an equestrian event.

The lineup of Olympic equestrian sports was not firmly established until the 1912 Stockholm Games presented three events: Jumping, Dressage, and the ThreeDay Event or "Military" as it was then called. Jumping and Dressage are refined arena sports, but the Three-Day Event combined shortened versions of both events with a galloping ride over jumps on natural terrain, simulating the conditions a military horseman might face riding cross-country.

As a point of pride and a demonstration of skill, the armies of many countries devoted substantial resources to international equestrian competition. "The determination of these combinations requires long periods of training of both men and horses," wrote Major General Guy V. Henry, chairman of the Olympic Games Equestrian Committee, in his post-Games report of 1932. "Since this involves more time than civilians are able to devote, participation in Olympic Equestrian Events today, in all nations, is confined to that military personnel whose general training is along similar lines."

Edwin Yancey Argo was born on September 22, 1895, in Hollins, Alabama, then a prosperous lumber town; but its mill closed in 1911, around the time the Argo family moved to Talledega. Argo received an appointment to the United States Military Academy in West Point, but left after a year. Returning to Alabama, he continued in the Army ROTC at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, where he majored in Electrical Engineering. Argo enlisted in the National Guard in 1917 and was soon called to duty. Serving in the Army Field Artillery, Argo rose to the rank of second lieutenant. While most of the army's accomplished horsemen served in the Cavalry, the Field Artillery used horses to draw its caissons, and officers needed to learn to ride adroitly. Though mechanized vehicles were coming into use, military leaders believed that the flexibility of horse power gave it strategic value.

The main equestrian training center for the U.S. Army was the Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas. Argo made it into the Advanced Course in Equitation, an elite one-year course for the army's most accomplished company-grade officers. This course prepared officers to supervise equestrian training in their own regiments, but it soon became a feeder for the Army Equestrian Team. Despite a lack of competitive experience, Argo reached the final tryouts in Rye, New York. His name was the last one on the team roster announced on June 4, 1928, a month before the team departed for Amsterdam.

"The task of keeping the horses fit on shipboard will be a difficult one," the New York Times reported five days later, "but it is hoped to rig up some sort of training wheel that will prove practical." This may be a reference to the time that Argo reportedly "finagled" a treadmill used in the play Ben Hur to exercise the horses on a transatlantic trip. In the face of stiff European competition, the team dropped out of dressage competition to free the most experienced riders for the two remaining events. Although his name appears on some records of the 1928 team, Argo never competed in the Amsterdam Olympics.

Three years and a promotion later, Argo gained a new partner in Honolulu Tomboy, a six-year-old chestnut mare bred at Fort Reno, Oklahoma. A horse in her prime, of good racing stock, she stood fifteen hands two-and-a-half inches tall (5'2 ½"). She and Argo began their journey to Los Angeles by winning the Semi-Final Olympian Equestrian Tryout at Fort Riley, Kansas, on October 15, 1931. Ten days later they placed second in the final tryout and won their spot on the team, which was captained by Major Harry D. Chamberlin, a Fort Riley instructor and veteran of the 1920 and 1928 Olympic teams.

The Games of the Tenth Olympiad began on July 30 in Los Angeles, the first Games ever held in the United States. For the first time events were tightly scheduled to wrap up in sixteen days; previous summer Olympics had lasted at least two and a half months. Both the remoteness of California and the struggles of the Great Depression affected the games, with only half as many athletes participating as had four years previously in Amsterdam. Still, 1,332 athletes from thirty-seven countries competed in 117 events in fourteen sports (compared to the more than ten thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries competing in today's Olympics).

Male athletes were housed in an Olympic Village for the first time, while female athletes stayed at a luxury hotel. Four-legged athletes were housed in fireproof stables at the Riviera Country Club, which hosted the first two days of the Three-Day Event.