Cecil Healy

Cecil Healy was an Australian freestyle swimmer born in Darlinghurst, Sydney, on 28 November 1881. A member of the East Sydney Swimming Club, he was an early champion of the crawl stroke and won Australasian titles over 110 yards from 1905. He took bronze in the 100 metre freestyle at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, toured Europe giving many spectators their first sight of the crawl, and at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm won silver in the 100 metre freestyle behind Duke Kahanamoku and gold in the 4 x 200 metre freestyle relay for the combined Australasian team. His sportsmanship at Stockholm, where he helped the American sprinters win an appeal to swim a special qualifying race, probably cost him the gold medal. He wrote an influential 1913 article on the crawl stroke, won a Royal Humane Society silver medal for surf rescues, was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1981, enlisted in 1915 and was killed on the Somme on 29 August 1918.