Dan Carroll is on the AOC's list of Australian gold medal Olympians as a member of the 1908 Wallabies, the winners 32-3 against England/Cornwall in the final of the rugby event at the London Games. But he has not received the recognition he truly deserves from the AOC or from sports historians as one of Australia's greatest Olympians.
Edwin Flack, the winner of the 800 metres and 1500m at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, is rightly honoured as the first Australian to win two gold medals at the same Games. But who was the first Australian to win a gold medal at two different Olympics? Answer: Dan Carroll.
As a star of the First XV at Sydney's St Aloysius College, Carroll was a quicksilver winger who could run the 100 yards in "a shade over evens". He was the youngest member of the 1908 Wallabies and scored two tries in the final, both of them runaways.
In an intriguing mirror image of the Sonny Bill Williams affair, 13 members of the gold-medal Wallabies "converted" to rugby league the next season. Carroll, though, kept the faith. He was a member of the Wallabies side that toured California in 1912, defeating All-America 12-8.
Carroll stayed on in the US, served in the armed forces, enrolled at Stanford University, did a degree in geology, married, and died in New Orleans probably around 1956/57. Rugby was once again an Olympic sport at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp. The AOC's official list of medal winners for these Games notes: "No Gold Medals won." This is strictly true, if the criterion is limited to Australians in the Australian team.
But here is Harry Gordon in his magisterial history Australia and the Olympic Games: "Ironically, the only Australian to carry away a gold medal from the 1920 Olympics was Dan Carroll, the playing coach of the American rugby team and a former winger for the Wallabies."
Then in the 1924 Paris Olympics, Carroll coached the American team to their second successive gold medal for rugby. The final between France and the USA was one of the most memorable rugby matches ever played. The Americans had their clothes stolen during a training session, and some were spat upon in the streets. A tall wire fence was erected inside the stadium to restrain the chauvinistic crowd baying for a French win. The American anthem was booed by a crowd of about 40,000 spectators. The American 17-3 victory led to further disruptive behaviour by the incensed spectators.
Rugby has not been part of the Olympic Games since 1924, except for a strange tournament held four months before the 1936 Berlin Olympics which involved Germany, Italy, France and Romania. There was some talk about a rugby tournament being played at the Sydney Olympics but this did not happen.
Since then, however, the IRB has developed an impressive case, based on the popularity of Sevens rugby, for the inclusion of rugby in the 2016 Olympics. Now nearly nine years old, the IRB's international sevens rugby circuit is highly successful. There are sevens tournaments in the World Games (to be held in Taiwan in 2009), the Asian Games, the Pan Am Games and the Commonwealth Games (where the tournament has had great crowd support).
There will be a Rugby World Cup Sevens tournament for women next year, to be played in Dubai at the same time as the men's competition (a trial run for a similar Olympic tournament?) The IRB has more than 90 affiliated national rugby unions and is spending about £150 million ($325m) in the next four years to develop rugby on a global basis. China, Japan, the USA and Russia are rugby Test-playing nations.
The IOC is committed to having 28 sports in the 2016 Olympics. Rugby is on a shortlist that includes softball, karate, golf and roller sports. Rugby's merits for inclusion in terms of its Olympic history and its reach as a global sport are obvious. It would be appropriate if the AOC - in a belated honouring of Dan Carroll, perhaps - led the push inside the IOC for rugby's rightful re-inclusion as an Olympic sport.
