The Accidental Olympic Gold

Imagine being the first female Olympian to win a medal for your country, and not realising it. Well thats exactly what happened to Margaret Abbott.

The second modern Olympiad took place in Paris in 1900 where golf entered the roster. Golf Club Compiegne, about 30 miles north east of the capital, was the host for the tournament. As a symptom of the time, women were only allowed to compete in a small handful of events and golf was one of them.

Abbott, who had travelled from Chicago to Paris earlier that year to study the art of Rodin and Degas had been an avid golfer her whole life. Upon seeing a 9 hole tournament taking place near the city, she thought it would be fun to enter. Early Olympics took place across a 4 month stretch, crossing over with other national events and competitions: which meant the details of what she had entered were a little vague. Unbeknownst to Margaret, she was about to tee it up in the second ever Olympic Games.

She knocked it round in 47 strokes to win by 2 and received an antique porcelain bowl embellished with gold for her efforts. Writing home to her family she explained that she had won a golf tournament but displayed no knowledge of its magnitude.

It wasn’t until 70 years later when Paula Welch, a professor at the University of Florida, stumbled across Abbott’s misspelled name on a plaque at the United States Olympic Committee’s headquarters in New York and began to dig deeper. 10 years of research later, and the truth was uncovered. Abbott was the first American female Olympian to win a Gold Medal.