As the year wraps up, we want to dedicate some blog space to the last few Olympic missing links that we came up with during the year: cases for whom we believed to have identified their date of death but, for whatever reason, we were unable to connect the information, such as obituary or public record, conclusively to the athlete. As always, we present them here not only in the hopes of solving some of these cases, but to continue our commitment to transparency in our research.
Kim Gyu-Hwan – Member of the South Korean football team at the 1948 London Olympics
Kim Gyu-Hwan, born July 16, 1921, also known as Kim Kyu-hwan, got his start in football at Kwangseong High School and went on to play for Pyongyang FC before Korea split into North and South. By the time of the 1948 London Olympics, however, the national Olympic committee was only representing the South and Kim was among those selected to take part in the football tournament at the Games. There, the country defeated Mexico in round one, before losing to upcoming gold medalists Sweden in the quarterfinals; Kim appeared in both matches. He later went on to have some prominence in the coaching and administration of the sport, serving as assistant manager to the national squad in the early 1960s and later working with the team known now as Busan IPark. Both the English and Korean Wikipedias list Kim as dying on October 5, 2007, but we have been unable to locate any source to verify this claim.
Josef Matěásko – Member of the Czechoslovakian military ski patrol team at the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics
All we know for certain about Josef Matěásko was that he was a member of the Czechoslovakian military ski patrol team that finished eighth at the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics. Since this was a demonstration event that year, like Eisstockschießen, data for many of the competitors, especially those who did not take part in official Olympic events is lacking, and we have been unable to find much else on Matěásko, despite it being a relatively uncommon name. We did locate a record for a Czech Josef Matěásko born in 1912 who died in 1991, which would be about the right age for someone to have competed at the 1936 Games. Without further verification, however, we can only speculate.
Just a brief post for today as we wrap up the year. Things get busy in December, particularly as we prepare our lists of 1930-born Olympians, and we already have a handful of Olympic mysteries from that cohort. We hope that you will join us in the future as we share our research and try to solve some of these mysteries!