Don Anthony made an unusually versatile contribution to the Olympic Movement. He was a hammer thrower in the 1956 Games, he founded the English Volleyball Association, he was both a university lecturer in physical education and a sports administrator for more than 50 years and he extensively researched the Much Wenlock Games, the forerunner of the Modern Olympics.
Immensely cheerful and humorous, Anthony inspired generations of students with his knowledge and enthusiasm, teaching in Britain and also abroad, working for organisations such as Unesco and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). For Anthony, there always had to be a moral and social purpose behind physical endeavour and he was a devoted admirer of Philip Noel-Baker, the 1912 Olympic silver medallist and Nobel prizewinner, whose written work and speeches he compiled in a biography, Man of Sport, Man of Peace.
Don Anthony was born in 1928 and brought up in Watford, Hertfordshire. He was initially a sprinter and at Loughborough College was second-string to Jack Archer, the 1946 European 100 metres champion. He also represented Watford in one Football League game and played regularly for their reserves. He first tried to throw the hammer as a 22-year-old, watched by Dennis Cullum, a leading coach. It landed only just over 30 metres away and Anthony fell on his back.
Intrigued by the complexity of the action, he began training seriously under Cullum. Anthony’s height of 1.76 metres (5ft 9in) did not particularly disadvantage him in the hammer, when compared to the other throwing events, and he was an early user of weight-training in British athletics saying: “To throw anything one must be strong and fast.” He won the AAA National title in 1953, setting a UK record, was fifth in the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games and 12th in the 1956 Olympics and continued competing as an international until 1959.
He then concentrated on playing volleyball, which he had discovered while on National Service in Cyprus. On returning home, he set up the English Volleyball Association, which he represented on the British Olympic Association for 33 years and was the national governing body’s president from 1968 until his death. He will miss the result of a lifelong mission by only a few weeks with Britain taking part for the first time in an Olympic volleyball tournament.
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While competing as an athlete, Anthony had funded himself to attend the German Sports University in Cologne and became a Fellow at the University of Helsinki in 1953. He was an assistant lecturer at Manchester University and then taught at Loughborough before, in 1959, being appointed head of the PE department at Avery Hill College in southeast London, a post he held until 1985. He completed his doctorate in 1972 on “The role of sport in developing countries” and the following year was a Unesco consultant in Libya. His last academic post was visiting Professor in Sport and Culture at the East Mediterranean University in nothern Cyprus from 1998 to 2005.
When Birmingham bid to stage the 1992 Games, Anthony was able to focus his historical research into the origins of the Olympic Movement in Britain by writing a booklet entitled Britain and the Olympic Games, which was completed before the vote in Lausanne in 1986. Supporters of Birmingham’s candidature were keen to link the geographical proximity of their city with Much Wenlock in Shropshire. But Birmingham still finished fifth out of six cities in a ballot won by Barcelona.
However, Anthony’s diligence was acclaimed for uncovering much of Britain’s early Olympic heritage and he also ensured that William Penny Brookes’s Olympian Games in Much Wenlock, which started in 1850 and have continued until this day, received their rightful place in the history of the Modern Games. The Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Games in Athens in 1896, received added motivation in his ambition after meeting Brookes and visiting the sporting festival in Shropshire in 1890. Anthony also researched the role played by John Hulley and Ernst Georg Ravenstein, who together with Brookes organised the first National Olympian Games at Crystal Palace for athletic events and Teddington for aquatic competitions in 1866.
In 1994 Anthony welcomed Juan Antonio Samaranch to Much Wenlock, where the IOC president planted a tree to mark the centenary of the founding of the IOC in Paris and, in the same year, Anthony was selected as the sole Briton to receive a special award from the IOC for services to the Movement. Anthony was appointed an MBE in 2011.
Despite increasing ill-health, Anthony had been looking forward to the London Games and it was his suggestion that the acorns, originally planted by de Coubertin at Much Wenlock in 1890, should be used to seed oaks in the Olympic Park in East London. Anthony’s admiration for Noel-Baker led to a statue of the Nobel prizewinner being erected in Hiroshima to commemorate the need for understanding between different countries, a philosophy to which Anthony himself always adhered.
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He is survived by his wife and son.
Don Anthony, MBE, Olympic athlete, administrator and educator, was born on November 6, 1928. He died on May 28, 2012, aged 83