8 Fierce Summer Olympians from Maine

In the annals of the state's Summer Games history, there’s no shortage of contenders.

illustration of some of Maine's greatest olympians
By Al Daniel and Sarah Stebbins
Illustration by Steven Salerno
From our July 2024 issue

In July 1924, Lewiston native Bob LeGendre sailed into the long-jump pit at the Paris Olympics and set a new world record. The event was the first in what was then the Olympic pentathlon, a five-sport mash-up that encompassed javelin and discus throwing, a 200-meter sprint, a 1,500-meter run, and the long jump. LeGendre’s combined score across all events earned him the bronze — and the distinction of being the first Mainer to medal in an Olympics. A week later, Cape Elizabeth native Bill Kirschbaum took bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke. Heading into this month’s Paris Games, we thought we’d bask in the glory of a handful of Summer Olympians and Paralympians who’ve done the Pine Tree State proud over the last century. 

Edmund “Rip” Black
Sport: Hammer Throw
Hometown: Harpswell

A Bailey Island lobsterman who traveled by boat to Portland for high school, Black earned the nickname “Rip” on the football field, where “he used to slash opposing lines to fragments,” according to a 1928 newspaper account. When he happened by track-and-field practice one day, an errant “hammer” (a 16-pound metal ball attached to a cable) landed at his feet. Black hurled it back with such force the coach recruited him for the team. While attending the University of Maine, Black qualified for the 1928 Summer Olympics, where he won bronze for a hammer throw of nearly 161 feet, about 12 feet shy of what he’d been firing at UMaine. “He was a little bit disappointed that he hadn’t won the gold medal because he thought he was the best,” longtime News Center Maine broadcaster Bill Green, who interviewed Black in the ’80s, recalled in 2021. After the Olympics, Black returned to lobstering off Bailey Island and took up candlepin bowling, winning a state championship in 1970. 

Hugh Freund
Sport: Sailing
Hometown: South Freeport

During his freshman year at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University, in 2007, Freund was diagnosed with aggressive bone cancer and given a choice: amputate his right leg below the knee or attempt to save the limb, knowing he’d never regain full use of it. “It was going to improve my quality of life to take the leg rather than rebuild it, so it was done totally with the thought in my mind that I wanted to be back running, skiing, biking, hiking — you name it,” Freund said in 2016. Shortly after returning to college with a prosthetic lower leg, the school’s sailing coach suggested he pursue Paralympic sailing. Freund, who grew up sailing at Freeport’s Harraseeket Yacht Club, joined a three-man keelboat team that went on to win silver at the 2016 Summer Paralympic Games. “Paralympic sailing sort of found me; I didn’t find it,” Freund said at the time. “But it definitely became an awesome part of my recovery.”

Elle Logan
Sport: Rowing
Hometown: Boothbay Harbor

Midway through their 2,000-meter race at the 2016 Olympics, Logan’s team was lagging in third place when coxswain Katelin Snyder shouted into her headset, “This is the U.S. Women’s 8!” The declaration was meant to remind the eight rowers of their team’s status. With varying lineups, the Women’s 8 had won every major international event for a decade, including three World Rowing Championships and their last two Olympic races with Logan in the boat. As Snyder urged them on, the U.S. rowers moved ahead of the field, clinching a third gold. “It might be a bit arrogant,” Logan said with characteristic modesty later. “There is this sense of dynasty that we’re a part of, [so] let’s prove it.” Logan took to rowing at the Brooks School, in Massachusetts, and made her first Olympic team as an undergrad at Stanford. She and Ian Crocker (below) are the only Maine natives with three Olympic gold medals, though it’s journalists, not Logan, who tend to point this out. 

Joan Benoit Samuelson
Sport: Marathon
Hometown: Cape Elizabeth

“I was absolutely amazed that it was over and I had had it so easy,” Samuelson recalled of the moment she strode out of a Los Angeles tunnel at the end of the first women’s Olympic marathon, in 1984. “Even the parts that I’d dreaded, like the Marina Freeway, were fine. In fact, the freeway was where I felt the most at ease. I was all by myself, without even any spectators. That’s the thing I’ll tell the grandchildren, that I ran down an L.A. freeway all alone.” History books can tell them the rest: How Samuelson won the 1979 Boston Marathon as a Bowdoin undergrad; how she set a world record when she won the race again in 1981; and how she underwent surgery for a knee injury 17 days before the 1984 Olympic-trial competition, still managed to qualify, and handily won gold at the games. Now 67, the lifelong Mainer is still crushing marathons, including one in Tokyo in March.

Ian Crocker
Sport: Swimming
Hometown: Portland

Maine had no Olympic-size pool until 2020, when Colby College installed its 50-meter-long one. Back in the late ’90s, Cheverus High School student Crocker trained for his first Olympics in a Portland elementary-school pool that was roughly half that size — “a hole in the ground,” he has called it. The butterfly was Crocker’s specialty, and he swam it on medley relay teams that won gold at the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Summer Games (the latter two with teammate Michael Phelps cheering him on). Crocker also won silver in the 100-meter butterfly and bronze in the freestyle relay at the 2004 games. “The whole time I was growing up, swimming people told me if I was going to make it to the Olympic level, I’d have to leave the state of Maine,” Crocker, who’s now a swimming coach in Texas, recalled in 2008. “So it really made me proud to be able to go to my first Olympics with all of my training having been in Maine.”

Anna Goodale
Sport: Rowing
Hometown: Camden

On her first day at Syracuse University, in 2001, a member of the women’s crew team told the 6-foot-tall Goodale she looked like she should be a rower. Goodale joined the team as a neophyte, rising to become co-captain her senior year. She went on to help the United States win gold at the 2006 and 2007 World Rowing Championships before earning a seat on the eight-member crew, alongside Boothbay Harbor’s Elle Logan (above), that took gold at the 2008 Olympics. “I attribute a lot of my work ethic and character to growing up in Maine,” Goodale said afterward. “We have a great opportunity for people [to be] athletic because we are surrounded by the natural world.” As for what might have primed her for rowing glory, Goodale noted, “My father taught me how to row a dinghy; it’s a little different than rowing in the Olympics, [but] it was a great start.” 

Glorianne “Glo” Perrier
Sport: Canoe Sprint
Hometown: Lewiston

In 1959, Perrier developed a reputation for a unique bowling technique that involved pitching, not rolling, the ball. Worried about damage to his lanes, the owner of the Washington, D.C., alley Perrier frequented asked friends to help find her another sport. Frank Havens, an Olympic contender in the canoe sprint (in which participants race in canoes or kayaks, depending on the event), invited Perrier, who was 30 and, despite growing up in Maine, had never set foot in a boat, to try kayaking. Perrier took to it and, in 1961, began training in a tandem boat with 12-year-old kayaker Francine Fox. Three years later, a wire service reported, “the lightly regarded American girl canoeists stunned European veterans” by snagging silver in the 500-meter at the Olympics. Reflecting decades later, Perrier was still awestruck. “Hey, a 15-year-old and a 35-year-old woman who had never been in a boat until the age of 30? That was spectacular.” 

Hiram Tuttle
Sport: Dressage
Hometown: Dexter

Tuttle traced his origins as a lover of equines to his late-1800s upbringing in Dexter, where, he said, “The community standing of a man was usually measured by the quality and condition of his horses.” He learned to ride a plow horse bareback at age four and later worked in a blacksmith shop before becoming a lawyer in Boston. At the onset of World War I, he joined the Army, where he oversaw the purchase and breaking of horses for the military, while also training his own team for competitions. In 1930, the Army tapped him for the 1932 Olympic dressage event, in which a rider and horse are judged on how they carry out a series of increasingly complex movements. Competing with his aptly named thoroughbred, Olympic, Tuttle took bronze, becoming the first American to win an individual Olympic medal in dressage. His three-man team also won bronze. In 1956, Tuttle was buried near three of his horses at the Fort Riley Army base, in Kansas.

Down East magazine, February 2025

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