Harold Maurice Abrahams , British Olympic sprint champion.
Background
Ethnicity:
Abrahams's father, Isaac, was a Jewish immigrant from the Congress Poland part of the Russian Empire.
Harold Abrahams followed two older brothers into athletics and Cambridge University.
Education
Abrahams studied at Cambridge (the faculty of Law).
Career
Between 1920 and 1923 Abrahams enjoyed an outstanding athletic career at Cambridge. He had eight victories over Oxford in three events. He was less successful in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, where he failed to win a medal.
In 1924 he devoted himself to the Paris Olympic Games.
The following year a leg injury ended his competitive career, but not his interest in sport. He became a laywer and was a member of the general committee of the British Amateur Athletic Association for fifty years and became its president, and was secretary, treasurer, and chairman of the British Amateur Athletic Board.
In 1936 Abrahams became a controversial figure when he refused to back attempts to boycott the Berlin Olympics.
In 1981 a somewhat fictional version of incidents in his athletic career was made into the award winning motion picture, Chariots of Fire.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The Marquess of Exeter, a good friend and a member of the International Olympic Committee, said of Abrahams, “He was a tremendous collector of statistics relating to the sport and produced a number of volumes on the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. He had a first-class brain and decisive views which he never hesitated to express strongly."
In 1936, when Abrahams refused to back attempts to boycott the Berlin Olympics, The Jewish Chronicle reported that he “expressed the view that as an individual he could better assist German Jewry through his contacts in the sporting world. He broadcast for the BBC from the Berlin Olympic stadium when the games opened in Hitler’s presence.”