On the afternoon of July 20, 1924, in the Olympic pool in Paris, the twenty-year-old son of Austrian immigrants from a Pennsylvania coal town set himself apart from every swimmer who had ever lived. A minute before the start of the 100-meter freestyle, the event’s defending champion, Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii, stood on the blocks next to his younger brother Sam. In the water beside them was Johnny Weissmuller, the ambitious young man who had come for Duke’s crown. In fifty-nine seconds, Weissmuller touched the wall first, taking the gold medal and beating both Kahanamoku brothers.

He had already won the 400-meter freestyle two days earlier, and later that same day he anchored the American relay team to another gold. He left Paris with three Olympic medals, all of them gold. That moment was not the beginning. It was the validation of a promise made years earlier in a Chicago gymnasium.

Johnny Weissmuller was born Janos Peter Weissmuller on June 2, 1904, in Windber, Pennsylvania, a small mining town near Johnstown. His parents were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father worked the coal mines, and the family remained in Windber only a few years before moving to Chicago in 1908, where the elder Weissmuller ran a saloon and his wife worked as a cook at the city’s well-known Turnverein restaurant. Young Johnny attended St.

Michael’s parochial school and later Manier public school, but his formal education ended after the eighth grade when his father died of tuberculosis, a disease he most likely contracted during his years in the Pennsylvania mines. To support the family, Weissmuller worked as a bellhop and elevator operator at the Plaza Hotel in Chicago. In his free time, he and his younger brother Peter, both devoted swimmers, joined the Stanton Park pool, where Johnny won every junior race he entered. At twelve, he lied about his age to join the local YMCA swim team.

During the summers he spent every spare moment at Oak Street Beach, where he and Peter helped rescue twenty people from Lake Michigan after a boat accident; of those they pulled from the water, only eleven survived. Shortly after his father’s death, Weissmuller came under the influence of a substitute father figure when he began training at the Illinois Athletic Club under William “Big Bill” Bachrach, already famous as the coach of several Olympic swimming champions. When Weissmuller asked Bachrach to train him, Bachrach set his conditions. He told the boy he would work with him for a year without asking questions.

He would not race against anyone. He would be Bachrach’s slave and would hate his coach with all his heart. But in the end, Bachrach promised, he might break every record in existence. The prediction proved close to prophecy.

At Weissmuller’s first major competition, the 1921 Amateur Athletic Union outdoor championships, he easily won his first race ever, the 50-yard freestyle. Over the next three years, he won every race he entered. By the time of the 1924 Paris Olympics, the twenty-year-old already held the world record in the 100-meter freestyle. His victory over the Kahanamoku brothers confirmed his dominance, and he returned from the Games with his three gold medals.

Four years later, at the Summer Games in Amsterdam, Weissmuller carried the American flag in the opening ceremony and repeated his victories in the 100-meter freestyle and the 800-meter relay, bringing his career Olympic total to five gold medals across two Games. Throughout the 1920s he remained unstoppable in amateur competition, winning thirty-six individual national AAU titles and sixty-seven world championships. In 1924 he set a world record in the 100-meter freestyle at 57. 4 seconds, becoming the first swimmer to break the one-minute mark in that event.

His record stood for a decade. He was selected as the top American swimmer in 1922, won the Helm Award in 1923, and was elected to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1949. In 1929, Weissmuller made his film debut with a cameo appearance as himself in Glorifying the American Girl. The following year he collaborated with writer Clarence Bush on his first book, The American Crawl, and wrote two articles for The Saturday Evening Post.

But the early 1930s brought him a second career that would make his name famous in a completely different way. In 1932, Weissmuller starred as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan in Tarzan the Ape Man, opposite Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. It was the first of twelve Tarzan films he would headline over the next fifteen years. Among all the Tarzan films, whether starring Weissmuller or anyone else, his second, Tarzan and His Mate, is widely considered the best.

Released in 1934 and directed by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway, the film reunited Weissmuller and O’Sullivan, and their on-screen chemistry is generally regarded as the most compelling of all their pairings. Both actors delivered their finest performances in that film, and it stands as the high point of the series. As Weissmuller aged and could no longer wear Tarzan’s signature loincloth, he took on the character Jungle Jim in a series of twelve films that ran from the late 1940s until 1953. Though he appeared in a few films after the last Jungle Jim entry, his film career effectively ended by the mid-1950s.

Leaving Hollywood, Weissmuller returned to Chicago, where he founded his own swimming pool company and lent his name to various business ventures, including health food stores and cocktail lounges. He was not a shrewd businessman, and his ventures suffered, draining much of his earnings. In the mid-1960s he moved to Florida to manage the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale. In 1973 he went west to Las Vegas, where he worked for a time as a celebrity greeter at the MGM Grand Hotel.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Weissmuller’s health declined noticeably. He had married five times and fathered three children. After a series of strokes, he and his wife moved to Acapulco, Mexico, where he died of pulmonary edema on January 20, 1984. The Olympic champion who had broken the minute barrier in Paris, who beat Hawaiian royalty in the pool and swung through Hollywood jungles for a generation of moviegoers, ended his days quietly on the Mexican coast.

His five gold medals, his sixty-seven world championships, and the decade-long world record that followed him out of the water had long since secured his place in sporting history.