For the first time in a little while, Oldest Olympians has two milestone birthdays to celebrate so, rather than choose between them, we are going to feature both in a single blog entry!

(Muhammad Ashraf, pictured at SBS Urdu)

First, we are wishing a happy 96th birthday to Muhammad Ashraf, the oldest living Olympic wrestler! Ashraf represented Pakistan at the 1956 Melbourne Games, where he was eliminated in round four of the lightweight, freestyle event. He did win gold medals in this category at the 1958 and 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, in addition to bronze at the 1954 Asian Games. He coached the national team from 1960 through 1972 and then moved to Australia to run their wrestling squad. He now resides in Adelaide.

Secondly, British speed skater Henry Howes is turning 96 as the oldest living Olympic speed skater! Howes represented his country in four events at the 1948 St. Moritz Games, with a best finish of 18th in the 1500 metres. He won four national titles between 1946 and 1950 and now resides in Staines, Sussex.

Today Oldest Olympians is ending our look into mystery competitors from the 1948 London Olympics for whom we lack both a date of birth and confirmation as to whether they are alive or deceased. Given the time that has passed, nearly all of these Olympians would be at least 90 years old, but there is a possibility that some are still alive. Today we will conclude by mentioning the remaining Egyptian participants who meet this definition.

(Mohamed Soliman)

Our first Olympian is Mohamed Soliman, who represented Egypt in the basketball tournament at the London Games, where the nation placed 19^th in a field of 23 teams. He was a member of the Young Men’s Muslim Association of Cairo and we have a picture of him, posted above, but otherwise we have been unable to uncover more information due to his name being fairly common. We have encountered a similar problem with diver Mohamed Ibrahim, who placed 22^nd in the springboard event. In his case, we suspect that we may have gone by a different name domestically, but we have no proof.

The final two Olympians took part in the water polo tournament, where Egypt was eliminated in the semi-finals and placed seventh overall in the classification round. While we have had mixed results in locating information about the team in general, we have been unable to find anything at all about Mohamed Haraga and Mohamed Khadry.

(Abílio Brandão)

We have one more update on this subject: thanks to research from Connor Mah, we have learned that one of the Olympians that we covered in this series, Portuguese sport shooter Abílio Brandão, was born October 15, 1910 in Porto, giving us some additional information. With that, we are concluding our look into this topic, which means that next time we will have something new and different to present. We hope that you will join us!