Launceston Elliot

9 June 1874 – 8 August 1930 · British India → England → Melbourne

Launceston Elliot won the one-hand lift at the 1896 Athens Olympic Games, becoming the first Olympic champion from the United Kingdom in any sport. He came into lifting under the influence of Sandow and turned professional in 1903.

Origins

Elliot was born on 9 June 1874 in British India, at Kaladagi in what is now Karnataka (some sources give Hubli), into a branch of the Scottish Elliot family headed by the Earls of Minto; his father, Gilbert Wray Elliot, was a magistrate in the Indian Civil Service. His unusual first name came from Launceston, Tasmania, where he is said to have been conceived. In 1887 the family moved to England, where his father took up farming in Essex, and the thirteen-year-old Elliot soon came under Sandow's influence. At sixteen he competed in what is now regarded as the first British weightlifting championship, at the Café Monico in Piccadilly in January 1891, and in 1894 he won the championship at the Royal Aquarium, Westminster.

The work

At Athens in 1896, where there were no agreed international rules for weightlifting, Elliot tied with the Dane Viggo Jensen at 111.5 kg (246 lb) in the two-hands lift; Prince George of Greece awarded first place to Jensen for better style, leaving Elliot second. In the one-hand lift he raised 71 kg (156.5 lb) while Jensen, injured, managed 57 kg, and Elliot took the gold. He also ran in the 100 metres, lost his first-round wrestling bout to Carl Schuhmann, and finished last of five in the rope climb. At the 1900 Paris Games, where there was no weightlifting, he threw the discus and placed eleventh.

He set four records at the 1899 amateur championships and turned professional in 1903. After retiring he farmed in England for some years before emigrating to Australia, settling in Melbourne in 1923. He died there of spinal cancer on 8 August 1930, aged fifty-six, and is buried in Fawkner Cemetery.

Notable feats

• Gold, one-hand lift, Athens 1896 — 71 kg (156.5 lb).
• Silver, two-hands lift, Athens 1896 — 111.5 kg (246 lb), tied with the winner on weight.
• British champion at the Royal Aquarium, 1894; four records at the 1899 amateur championships.

Method

Elliot's early lifting was shaped by Sandow and the London physical-culture scene of the late 1880s and 1890s. He left no training book of his own.

Legacy

Elliot's place in the Olympic record is permanent: he was Britain's first Olympic champion in any sport. His later professional career was solid rather than spectacular, and his emigration took him out of the British lifting scene in his last years. He is a figure who connects the strongman culture of the 1890s with the formal competition that the Olympic movement would later codify. Photographs of him are displayed among Scottish sporting figures at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and he is in the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame.

Disputed and unresolved

The 1896 lifting was not conducted under modern federation rules, and the decision in the two-hands lift turned on a judgement of style rather than weight. His exact birthplace is given differently in different sources.