Today we are continuing our look into Olympians for whom we believe to have identified their date of death but, for whatever reason, we are unable to connect the information, such as obituary or public record, conclusively to the athlete. This week we are looking into the Olympians who participated most recently, yet still remain part of our Olympic Mysteries series.

Andrés Amador – Member of El Salvador’s shooting delegations to the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics

Andrés Amador Velasco, born November 22, 1924, represented El Salvador at two editions of the Olympic skeet shooting tournament, in 1968 and 1972, finishing 43^rd and 47^th respectively. This is all we know about him for a certain, but one report noted that a moment of silence was held in honor of a man by the same in September 2013. Given how uncommon his (full) name is, we suspect that this deceased individual is the Olympian, but we are unable to confirm it at this time.

http://www.observatoriolegislativo.org.sv/index.php/sesiones-plenarias/sp12-15/item/239/239

Mariano Ninonuevo – Member of the Philippines shooting delegation to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

Like Amador, all we know about Mariano Ninonuevo, born August 15, 1921, is his sport shooting record at the Olympics. He represented the Philippines in the free pistol, 50 metres event at the 1964 Tokyo Games, where he placed 48^th. The only other clue we have been able to locate is an anonymous Wikipedia edit, which listed him as dying on May 7, 1993, but we have been unable to verify this date in any other sources.

Jindřich Kinský – Member of the Czechoslovakian basketball squad at the 1960 Rome Olympics

On the other hand, we know much about Jindřich Kinský, born June 27, 1927, who represented Czechoslovakia at the 1960 Rome Olympics, where his nation finished fifth. In addition to taking a silver medal at the 1951 Eurobasket, he won eleven medals at the national championships, including gold in 1954 and 1960. He played primarily for Sparta Praha, but had a stint with ATK (now ÚDA) Praha from 1952 to 1954. Following his retirement from active competition in 1963, he had a brief career as a coach during the 1960s. The Czech-language Wikipedia lists him as dying on April 8, 2008 and, while we have no reason to doubt this, we also have seen no outside confirmation.

Finally, when we did our review of the 1936 Berlin Olympics a while back, we forgot to raise the case of Gerda Gantz, born December 17, 1915, who represented Romania in the foil competition at those Games, where she was eliminated in round one. At the end of 2017, an anonymous user suggested that she died February 2, 2001 in Jerusalem, but, as is often the case, we were unable to verify this elsewhere.

That brings us to the end of this blog entry, but we hope that you will join us next week, when we start wrapping up this series so that we can move on to other mysteries!