Today on Oldest Olympians we wanted to take a quick look at the claimed recent deaths of two nonagenarian Olympians for whom we cannot locate obituaries. As usual, we do not have a particular reason to disbelieve the reports, but we also cannot confirm that they are true, so we are sharing this information with the community in the hopes that we may be able to learn more.

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(Lavy Pinto, pictured in an article from livemint.com)

Lavy Pinto – Member of India’s track and field athletics delegation to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics

Lavy Pinto, born October 23, 1929, represented India in track at the 1952 Helsinki Games, reaching the semifinals of both the 100 and 200 metres events. This was no fluke for Pinto, as he had been the champion in those competitions at the 1951 Asian Games, where he had also taken silver in the 4×100 metres relay. He had one more successful year in his sport and then retired in 1954. He eventually moved to Chicago in 1969, where he was still living half a century later. Someone claiming to be a family member stated that he died February 15 of this year in that city, but they did not reply to our request for more information and, as we could not locate an obituary either, we cannot confirm that he is deceased.

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Louis Baise – Member of South Africa’s wrestling delegation to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics

At the same Games attended by Pinto, Louis Baise, born May 4, 1927, represented South Africa in the flyweight, freestyle wrestling tournament, where he survived until round four and placed sixth overall. At every other major international tournament he attended, however, he won gold: the 1950 and 1953 Maccabiah Games and the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games. Following the latter competition, we had no additional information on his life and, unlike Pinto, we were not aware of his having been alive past his 90^th birthday. An anonymous user on Wikipedia, however, claimed that Baise died last month, on May 11, but we have been unable to verify that this is true.

That is all for today, just a short entry to further our goal of research transparency. We aim to have another blog entry next week, so we hope that you will join us! We are also interested in hearing if there are any Oldest Olympians-related topics that you would like covered; if so, let us know in the comments. We are always willing to consider ideas for new blog posts!