Lindy Remigino, Olympic Champion Runner, Dies at 87

Lindy Remigino, who had never won a major championship and was not even the best sprinter on his Manhattan College track team, but who nonetheless won the 1952 Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash in a monumental upset and then won a second gold medal in a relay, died on Wednesday at his home in Newington, Connecticut. He was 87.

His son, Mike, said the cause was prostate cancer.

In 1952, Remigino (pronounced rem-ih-JEE-noh) was a Manhattan College junior who did not appear to be on a path to make the Olympic team. That spring, he finished third in the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America track meet and fifth in the NCAA championships and did not qualify for the final in the Amateur Athletic Union national championships. But injuries struck some of America’s best sprinters, and he made the Olympic team by finishing second in the U.S. trials.

The strong favorite in the Olympic 100 meters was Herb McKenley of Jamaica. The mild-mannered Remigino was not expected to qualify for the six-man final. But before the race, as Remigino recalled in an interview for this obituary, Brutus Hamilton, the U.S. track and field coach, told him: “Americans always win the 100. Just remember that, Remigino.”

On race day at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, the cinder track was muddy. As always, the 5-foot-6, 138-pound Remigino ran low and somewhat ungainly, but he led from the start. At 80 meters, much too early, he started to lean.

“Because I was leaning so much so soon, I started slowing down,” he told The Hartford Courant in 1999. “The whole field was coming up on me.”

McKenley, in the next lane, closed in. Remigino realized McKenley had passed him and thought he had done so just before the finish. He placed a hand on McKenley’s shoulder.

“I was mad at myself,” Remigino told The Courant. “I was heartsick. I figured I’d blown it. I said, ‘Herb, you got me.'”

There was a long wait while the judges studied the photo-finish picture. Then they pointed at Remigino.

“Who won?” Remigino recalled asking, to which one judge replied, “You did, Mr. Remigino.”

Remigino walked back to McKenley.

“Gosh, Herb,” he said, “it looks as though I won the darn thing." The first four finishers were clocked at 10.4 seconds, the fifth and sixth finishers at 10.5. The camera showed no more than 6 inches separating first place from fourth.

The Jamaican officials protested. The judges studied still photos for 20 minutes and concluded that Remigino’s right shoulder had beaten McKenley’s chest by an inch. Remigino was still walking around in a daze when Parry O’Brien, the American who won the shot-put that day, shook him, lifted him on a shoulder and told him to get excited.

Remigino won another gold medal in Helsinki in the 4x100-meter relay. But he had no family there to help celebrate.

“No one could afford to go,” he said years later. “I couldn’t even call home. They paid us $1.75 a day. That’s all I had.”

McKenley was left with bad memories. As he once told The Jamaica Observer: “At 95 meters, I found myself in fifth position. I passed everybody in that last five meters, and to this day I still think I won that race.”

Lindy John Remigino (his father named him after Charles A. Lindbergh) was born on June 3, 1931, in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His father, Stefano, was a chef, and his mother, Rose (Strada) Remigino, was a homemaker.

“I was a poor student,” Remigino told the Los Angeles Times in 1984. “I just wanted to get out of high school and go to work for a box shop in town for $25 a month. Then my high school track career started going very well.”

He won the 100-yard title in the 1949 New England high school championships in 9.8 seconds, a New England record. He wanted to go to Seton Hall University in New Jersey so he could run with Andy Stanfield, a future Olympic teammate, but his grades were too low. He went to Manhattan College instead.

“That was the smartest thing I ever did,” he once said. “I went in a rough kid who was a poor student and came out a damn good student.”

He graduated from Manhattan in 1953 and that year married June Haverty, who survives him, along with his son; his daughters, Kathleen Remigino, Betty Remigino Knapp, Linda Moulthrop and Patricia Gere; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Remigino coached track for 43 years at Hartford Public High School, where his teams won 21 state outdoor titles and 10 indoor titles.

“I used to tell my sprinters, ‘If you can beat me, you make the team,'” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I could beat every sprinter until I was 42. That’s when a lot of them started beating me.”