As you may have heard, there’s an amputee competing in this year’s Olympics: Australian field hockey player Matt Dawson. He suffered a severe injury to a finger on his right hand a couple weeks back, and his doctors gave him a choice: surgery and rehab, which would preserve the finger but force Dawson to miss the Olympics; or partial amputation, which would allow him to compete. He chose amputation and has already appeared in three matches as Australia—the silver medalist in 2021—tries to get back to the podium.

If the Aussies succeed, Dawson will become the first amputee Olympic medalist in 120 years, and only the second in history. Unless and until that happens, the lone amputee to win a medal at the Olympics remains George Eyser, a gymnast who competed on a wooden leg at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis. Eyser, a below-knee amputee, didn’t stop at one medal; he brought home six, including three golds.
Why haven’t you heard more about this guy? Several reasons, beginning with the fact that the 1904 Olympics—only the third Games of the modern era—were a far cry from the global spectacle that’s currently unfolding in Paris. Only 12 nations sent athletes, and most of the non-US rosters were pretty thin. For example, the gymnastics field included 119 entrants—110 from the USA, seven from Germany, and one apiece from Austria and Switzerland. Team USA won 26 of the 33 gymnastics medals handed out that year, and 231 of the 280 medals handed out overall, making it the least competitive Olympics in history.
OK, but still: Is it not impressive that, even in a diluted field, an amputee beat 118 nondisabled gymnasts?
To be fair, the 1904 Games were more international than it appears at first blush, as a large number of the athletes who wore American uniforms had been born overseas. Eyser himself was German by birth, moving to the US as a teenager in the 1880s. And the US gymnasts came from all over the country—Eyser was up against the top American performers from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere. So at the very least, we can say he credibly earned the title of US national champion.
One of his golds came on the parallel bars, an event which remains a staple of Olympic competition in men’s gymnastics. Another came in the 25-foot rope climb. But Eyser’s most impressive feat came on the long-horse vault, which (like modern vault competitions) begins with a long run-up to gather speed, followed by a leap, a handspring off the apparatus to accentuate height, some midair flips and twists, and a landing. It would be insanely difficult to execute that sequence of maneuvers on a carbon-fiber running blade, let alone on a wooden prosthesis. But Eyser not only executed all three of his vaults at the Olympics, he excelled: That was his third gold medal.
He also took silver on the pommel horse and the all-around competition, adding a bronze on the horizontal bar. Six medals in all. No nondisabled gymnast collected more medals at the ’04 Games.
Eyser’s transcendent performance in St. Louis was no fluke; far from it. On the contrary, he was already well established as one of America’s best gymnasts. He entered his first tournament in 1890, before losing a limb, and finished ninth out of 30 entrants, a promising but not spectacular debut for a 20-year-old newbie. Eyser lost his leg fairly shortly thereafter, under uncertain circumstances; by 1893 he had resumed his gymnastics career on a prosthesis, drawing praise from Western Athletics magazine as “a splendid illustration of what physical training can do for one under adverse circumstances.” The following year he took first place at a gymnastic tournament in Wyoming, beginning a string of triumphs against top-level competition. In 1895 he finished first in a national gymnastics meet in Kansas City, prompting a newspaper to call him “one of the most remarkable athletes of his time.”
In other words, by 1904 he was already a 14-year veteran of the elite gymnastics circuit. And Eyser kept performing at a high level after his Olympic victories in St. Louis. In 1908 he returned to his native Germany to compete in a major international festival (the XI Deutsches Turnfest) that drew daily crowds of 100,000. As late as 1914, when Eyser was in his early 40s, he was still participating in local tournaments.
There’s much more to learn about Eyser in “A Forgotten Turner Classic,” Joshua Prager’s excellent article last month for The American Scholar.