Anton Heida

In 1904, Anton Heida won six medals, a record bettered by only a few Americans at one Olympics. Representing the Philadelphia Turngemeinde in 1904, his victories in the four-event all-around and the apparatus finals were also considered National Championships. His only other national title came in the 1902 horse vault. Heida went on to appear in vaudeville with an acrobatic troupe aptly named the “Olympic Trio”.

In a very unusual situation, Heida could be considered to have competed for two different nations at the 1904 Olympic Games. He was an Austrian native and when he won the team and individual all-around gold medal in the July turnverein competition, he was still an Austrian national. But he became a US citizen on 17 October 1904, so he was an American at the time of the late October gymnastics events. Heida later returned to Europe and worked as an interpreter for the US legation in France and Czechoslovakia in 1918-19, applied for a passport in Praha in 1919, and was still there in 1921.