Olympic rower named Henry Pearce stopped mid-race to allow ducklings to pass by him and he still won the race

An Olympic rower named Henry Pearce stopped mid-race to allow ducklings to pass by him and he still won the race

In his quarter-final, against Frenchman V. Savrin, Pearce not only set an Olympic record of 7 min 42.8 seconds, but, according to one Dutch newspaper, he also won the goodwill of the children of Amsterdam. He did this with one spontaneous gesture of grace under pressure: he pulled up mid-race to allow a duck, followed by a small flotilla of ducklings, to cross the course, to the delight of the onlookers, mostly children.

Pearce caught the Frenchman to win that race easily, and won the semi-final against Theodore Collett, of Great Britain, by four lengths without much effort. In the final, he was matched against the undefeated American Kenneth Myers, whom he beat by four lengths to set another Olympic record of 7:11.0 seconds. That record stood for 44 years, until the Soviet Union's Yuri Malishev took less than one tenth of a second off it in Munich 1972. Pearce was not really pressed in any of his five races, and his deceptively relaxed stroking style game him an air of easy invincibility. Thanks to his large winning margins and his behaviour in the episode of the ducklings, his was one of the more popular victories in Amsterdam.

Later life: During World War II, Pearce joined the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, and was made a lieutenant in charge of training new soldiers. He also did public relations work for the Royal Canadian Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander by his retirement in 1956. He then resumed his work as a liquor salesman, and in 1972 became a Canadian citizen. Pearce died in Toronto of a heart attack in 1976, at the age of 70. He was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1952 and the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1986. He is also an inductee of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.