George Sheldon

George Herbert Sheldon (1874 to 1907) was an American diver from St. Louis, Missouri, who won the first Olympic platform diving title at the 1904 Summer Olympics. He was an eye doctor who had studied at the Barnes Medical College in St. Louis. His victory was contested by the German competitors, whose stunt-style dives contrasted with the American emphasis on a clean entry into the water, and only after a week did the Games director James E. Sullivan reject the protest and declare Sheldon the winner. In 1905 he won the National AAU diving championship, the first held under a diving rule book and open to international divers, but heart trouble kept him from trying to regain the title. He died in St. Louis in November 1907, aged 33, of a heart lesion, and in 1989 the International Swimming Hall of Fame honoured him as a pioneer diver.