How race, celebrity and speed dominated the pool at the 1924 Olympics

A new book looks at how swimmers from Chicago, Hawaii and Japan helped usher in a new Olympic era a century ago in Paris

Competition took center stage in the men's 100m freestyle final at the 1924 Summer Olympics - then, as now, hosted by Paris. A century ago, swimming epitomized the Roaring Twenties. It was an era of fast music, fast vehicles - and fast swimmers. Yet if the battle for bragging rights in the pool was stiffer than ever, it was also occurring under more equal conditions: In a first, elite swimmers of different races got star billing at an Olympic final - a challenge to the era's popular pseudoscience of eugenics and widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the US. A new book, Three Kings: Race, Class, and the Barrier-Breaking Rivals Who Launched the Modern Olympic Age by Todd Balf, revisits the 1924 100m freestyle final as we approach the 2024 edition this week .

I think that the interest, in part, was just these three swimmers of different skin colors who really wanted to be the fastest there ever was in the signature event, the 100m," Balf says of his motivation for writing the book. I was looking into these fellows. They were described in the press in almost like superhero terms - mermen, they were flying fish, torpedoes."