Fans of Olympic trivia may already be familiar with the name Launceston Elliot but for anyone who is not, his is a story worth knowing.
Team GB’s first Olympic champion remains his nation’s only gold medallist in weightlifting, having triumphed in dramatic fashion at Athens 1896.
He earned two medals over the course of the day. His first was a controversial silver in the two-handed lift, after he lifted the same weight, 111.5kg, as Denmark’s Viggo Jensen. The Dane was deemed by judges to have had a better ‘style’ and was awarded the gold.
Elliot bounced back immediately in the one-handed lift. The British contender lifted 71kg with each arm in turn and Jensen could only summon the strength to lift 57kg, ensuring Elliot’s name entered the history books.
Named after the location in which he was conceived – Australia’s Launceston, rather than Cornwall’s – he was born in Kaladagi, India, in June 1874, though he was later described as ‘Scottish to the bone’ by his daughter Nancy.
It was not until 13 years later that he saw the UK for the first time, when his father moved to Essex to begin farming.
A naturally well-built youngster, Elliot soon took up weightlifting under the tutelage of the man known as the founder of modern-day bodybuilding, Eugen Sandow.
Elliot claimed the British title in 1894, two years before his appearance at the first Olympics of the modern era.
Joining him in the British weightlifting contingent was Lawrence Levy, who combined competing at the Games with reporting for his local newspaper in Birmingham.
As with so many athletes of the era, Elliot was not restricted to a single sport and his Olympic campaign began in the 100m, when he finished fourth and did not advance through his heat. He also competed in rope climbing and Greco-Roman wrestling, finishing fifth and fourth respectively.
Throughout the Games, he was a popular figure among the Greek crowds. The 1906 Official Report noted: "This young man attracted universal admiration by his uncommon beauty. He was of impressive stature, tall, well-proportioned, his hair and complexion of surprising fairness".
One newspaper even reported that he received “an offer of marriage from a highly-placed lady admirer”, which was politely declined.
Four years later, with weightlifting removed from the programme for the 1900 Games in Paris, Elliot turned his hand to discus and recorded an 11th-placed finish.
His post-Olympic career was just as eventful. In 1905, he put on a Music Hall act with a partner named Montague Spencer.
The two strongmen performed amid scenery representing the Roman arena and, bedecked in the garb of gladiators, they engaged in a mock contest during which they used the cestus, trident, net and other weapons of the arena.
At the end of the show, Elliot gave exhibitions of strength, the favourite of which was to support across his shoulders a long metal pole from which, at each end, was suspended a bicycle and rider.
Elliot would start revolving, slowly at first, but finally at such a speed that the “riders” would be swung into a horizontal position.
In 1923, Eliot and his wife, Emelia Holder, settled in Australia, where he died seven years later.
His legacy was cemented in 2012 when then-British Olympic Association (BOA) Chairman Lord Colin Moynihan led an international delegation of Olympic and government representatives in commemorating Elliot at a special ceremony at Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne.
A commemorative headstone was unveiled at his previously unmarked grave in the presence of his granddaughter Ann Elliot Smith and great grandson Ian Smith.