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Monday, September 11, 2000

Duke’s friend
returns original
Olympic flag

A diver in the 1920 Games gives
the IOC the flag he took on a
dare from the Hawaiian

Kyodo News Service

---

SYDNEY -- It was a prank of Olympic proportions that took 80 years for a punch line.

Hal Prieste, a diving bronze medalist at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, could not resist the dare of his buddy, surfing founder and fellow Olympian Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii, to climb a 15-foot flagpole at the Olympic stadium and take the first-ever Olympic flag.

Until recently, the whereabouts of the flag had remained unknown -- folded up in a dusty suitcase in Prieste's New Jersey home. But today, the flag found its way home, when the 103-year-old showman and practical jokester returned it to the International Olympic Committee.

Prieste delivered the flag from his wheelchair as the IOC opened its 111th session in Sydney after arriving with his doctor Nicholas Lamaina and could not resist joking, "Will there be a plaque with my name on it?"

He later posed for reporters with the original flag, believed to be the first commissioned by modern games founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin, which bears the tear marks from where it was wrenched off the flagpole in 1920.

Prieste said later that he would not miss giving the flag away because "I ain't gonna be around too long."

The joke was, as he described it, a "piece of cake" for the 24-year-old American. Carolyn Lamaina, the wife of Prieste's doctor, told reporters he wanted to take the flag to prove to people at home he was an Olympic champion.

The diminutive Prieste also had some fond recollections of the Laurel-and-Hardy-style relationship he enjoyed with Kahanamoku, winner of the 100-meter freestyle swimming event at the 1912 and 1920 Olympics.

"We were buddies. We were together all the time and we did a lot of comedy tricks like Laurel and Hardy," Prieste recalled.

Prieste's athleticism and humorous spirit saw him become one of the original Keystone Kops. He appeared in more than 25 movies and knew Charlie Chaplin and his idols Laurel and Hardy.

After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I, the California-born Prieste won a place on the U.S. diving team and traveled by ship to Antwerp where he won bronze in platform diving.