Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics C. A. J. Queckenberner, the first to win under the new rules at the national championships, made a throw in 1887 of 102 feet 7 inches. No national champion has since won with a throw of less than 1 20 feet. In 1889 J. S. Mitchell appeared. He won the championship that year and defended it successfully for eight consecutive years, until he went down before that other brawny Celt, the present champion, John Flanagan. Mitchell's hammer-throwing was not extraordinary, judged by present-day standards, and his better perform– ances were at the heavier weights; but he was a very consistent performer, and fourteen years after he won his first championship he won again, in 1903, with a longer throw than he had ever made before. There never was a weight-thrower who more thoroughly looked the part, and who kept on looking the part year after year while more meteoric athletes got too fat or too lazy to com– pete and dropped out of sight. You can still see him now, any day, nearly twenty years since he first began to win championships, shouldering his huge bulk through the nervous rush of Park Row, his broad face tanned winter and summer and look– ing as healthy as a side of beef. There are many things to see in the newspaper office where he works as sporting editor, but none, in that feverish and neurotic atmosphere, more cheerful and refreshing than the sight of the veteran weight-