The first Wisconsinite to win Olympic gold didn’t actually get a gold medal

(NEXSTAR) — The 2024 Paris Olympics are upon us, with dozens of athletes set to represent Team USA.

That includes 18 athletes who hail from Wisconsin, including Oshkosh’s Tyrese Haliburton and Neenah’s Maddie Wanamaker , all vying for Olympic gold.

As unique and mesmerizing as that feat may be, none of these athletes can compete to be the first with Wisconsin ties to secure Olympic gold (since 1924, nearly two dozen Wisconsinites , including some participating in the games in Paris, have received at least one Olympic gold medal).

That title was clinched more than 100 years ago by Alvin Kraenzlein.

His parents, German immigrants, moved to Milwaukee from Minneapolis soon after he was born in 1876. Kraenzlein would go on to attend UW-Madison and compete in track. He later attended the University of Pennsylvania as a dental school student where he set intercollegiate and world records in hurdling. According to a biography from the university, some of the records he set still stand .

During the 1900 Paris Olympics, he set a record by becoming the first athlete to win four individual gold medals — one each in the 60-meter dash, the 110-meter hurdles, the 200-meter hurdles and the long jump — in the same games. It took until the 1936 Berlin Olympics for another athlete, the U.S.’s Jesse Owens , would match that feat (Carl Lewis would do the same in 1984 but, as The Penn Gazette notes , they both received one of their gold medals by being on a relay team — Kraenzlein’s all came from individual events).

If that wasn’t enough, Kraenzlein set records in all of those events, according to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum (USOPM).

Kraenzlein’s technique of leaping over the hurdles with his lead leg extended outward has become the standard, but it was revolutionary at the time. Before Kraenzlein’s tactic caught on, runners would slow down before the hurdles, then jump over them “with both legs tucked,” USOPM explains.

While Kraenzlein appears to be the first Wisconsinite to win gold , he didn’t exactly win gold. The Olympics didn’t hand out gold medals until the 1904 Games in St. Louis.

Wisconsin does, however, have a special connection to those Games.

It was then that George Poage , a UW-Madison alum , became the first Black athlete from the U.S. to win an Olympic medal . The La Crosse native, then 23, came in third in both the 200-meter hurdles and 400-meter hurdles.

The two bronze medals he secured made Poage the first Black American Olympic medalist.

To honor Poage’s achievement, La Crosse named a city park after him and installed a four-piece sculpture in his honor in 2016.

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