Forgotten Glory

After 22-year-old American Margaret Abbott won the women’s golf competition at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, no gold award was hung around her neck. There was no standing on a platform as the Stars and Stripes was raised, no homecoming parade, no photo on the front of a Wheaties box.

In truth, Abbott strolled off the course unconscious that she had fair ended up the to begin with American lady to win an Olympic occasion, and she remained unaware to her put in sports history until her passing in 1955.

The 1900 Summer Olympics bore small likeness to today’s worldwide donning display. Distant from expending Paris, the moment organizing of the cutting edge Olympic Diversions was a sideshow to the World’s Reasonable being held at the same time in the French capital. The company that organized the 1900 Paris Piece too overseen the plan of freely organized donning occasions that extended over six months and included diverse competitions such as tug-of-war, Basque pelota, kite flying and pigeon racing.

It was distant from clear which occasions were portion of the Olympic program and which ones were held in conjunction with the World’s Reasonable. When Abbott entered a golf competition arranged by the show in October 1900, she thought she was competing simply for the championship of Paris.

Margaret Abbott Exceeds expectations on the Links

Born in India in 1878, Abbott was an newborn child when her American father kicked the bucket and her writer mother, Mary Abbott, brought her to the Joined together States. Working as a scholarly editor for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Times-Herald, Mary took up a unused wear picking up notoriety in 1890s tall society—golf—and presented the diversion to her girl. Playing at the Chicago Golf Club, Margaret demonstrated a speedy learner, winning a few neighborhood competitions. The statuesque youngster, about six feet tall, was portrayed in daily paper society pages as a “fierce competitor” with a “classy backswing.”

“Margaret Abbott has a characteristic ability for the game,” detailed the Associate Sea in 1898. “Miss Abbott plays golf with uncommon beauty and looks exceedingly well on the joins. Her drive is of significant length, and on the green she is totally at ease.” The daily paper anticipated Abbott would gotten to be “one of the best ladies golfers in the Joined together States.”

“When she was playing golf in Chicago, she gotten a parcel of compliments in the society columns with respect to her ability as a golfer,” says Paula Welch, a College of Florida teacher emerita and Olympic history specialist. “I don’t know that she thought almost being any kind of a part demonstrate and I don’t think she thought of herself as a pioneer, but she truly was a pathfinder.”

Mother and girl moved to the French capital in 1899 where Mary composed a travel direct to Paris for ladies and Margaret—as proficient at using a paintbrush as a putter—studied craftsmanship beneath Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As the century turned, Paris got to be the center of worldwide consideration as guests and competitors plummeted upon the city for the World’s Reasonable and Summer Olympics.

Women Make Their Olympic Make a big appearance in Paris

Much like the old Olympics after which it was modeled, the to begin with cutting edge Olympic Diversions in 1896 denied ladies from competing. Four a long time afterward, in any case, 22 ladies (out of about 1,000 competitors) were allowed to take an interest in the 1900 Summer Olympics in select sports regarded socially satisfactory for ladies such as croquet, equestrianism, tennis and golf.

Dressed in long sleeves and ankle-length skirts, both Mary and Margaret Abbott joined eight other ladies for a nine-hole competition organized by the presentation in Compiègne, 50 miles north of Paris, on October 3, 1900. The golfers who teed off at the Compiègne Golf Club included five French ladies and five American socialites who were examining or vacationing in Europe.

The biggest displays taken after Margaret as she carded a 47, two shots clear of Boston’s Polly Whittier, a relative of artist John Greenleaf Whittier who went through her summer hitting the fairway in St. Moritz, and six way better than Unused York socialite Myra Pratt, who afterward hitched a Serbian ruler. Mary Abbott shot a 65 in what remains the as it were time that a mother and girl competed in the same occasion in the same Olympics.

After her triumph, Margaret Abbott gotten an ancient Saxon porcelain bowl mounted in chiseled gold but no sign she had won an Olympic occasion. (Gold decorations did not ended up the conventional prize for Olympic champions until the 1904 Summer Games.)

In 1902, Abbott hitched humorist and political comedian Finley Diminish Dunne. The couple had three children and one girl, all of whom were unconscious that their mother had been America’s to begin with female Olympic winner until a sleuthing Olympic history specialist broke the news decades after Abbott’s passing in 1955.

Olympic Student of history Restores Abbott's Olympic Glory

In 1973, Paula Welch was going to the U.S. Olympic Committee base camp in Unused York City to investigate her thesis on America’s female Olympians when she taken note the title of the to begin with lady (incorrectly spelled as “Abbot”) on a plaque posting America’s past champions. Welch derives that Abbott’s title finished up on the plaque since of its consideration in a government report on the Paris Presentation that recorded her as the winner of the women’s golf event.

Unable to discover anybody mindful of Abbott’s story, Welch went through a decade following down answers herself. After poring through microfilm reels and blurred daily papers to learn everything she seem around the golfer, Welch distributed her discoveries in the October 1982 issue of The Olympian. She along these lines reached one of Abbott’s children, Dwindle Dunne, who learned for the to begin with time that his mother was an Olympic champion.

“There were a parcel of ladies who were progressing sports some time recently Title IX, and they weren’t truly given credit,” Welch says. “Margaret Abbott fair happened to be in the right put at the right time, and once that entryway was opened in 1900, ladies proceeded to take an interest in the Olympics.”

Following the 1900 competition, golf remained off the Olympic program until the 2016 Summer Recreations in Rio de Janeiro, which implied Abbott remained the ruling women’s Olympic golf winner for more than a century. Much obliged to Welch’s restoration of the golfer’s memory, Abbott was accepted after death into the Illinois Golf Corridor of Popularity in 2023.