Students, Amateurs and Attempted Murder: The Strange Case of the Paine Brothers and the 1896 United States Olympic Team

  Fourteen nations competed in the first ever modern day Olympic Games held in Athens in 1896.

In 1894 the newly created International Olympic Committee had unanimously chosen Athens as the site for the first modern Olympic Games as an homage to the city-states of ancient Greece whose original pan-Hellenic Olympiad in honor of the God Zeus had been held every four years, for over ten centuries beginning in 776 BCE and not ending until well into the 4th Century CE, when the by then Christianized Roman authorities finally put a stop to the Pagan tradition.  

Of the fourteen nations represented at the games of the 1st Olympiad thirteen were from Europe with the lone exception being the team from the United States.

The Olympic Games of 1896 were considered a great success.  At the time, the First Olympiad represented the largest international sporting event ever held and the Olympic Stadium in Athens, called the Panathenic Stadium, hosted a crowd of over 100,000 spectators for the game’s track and field finals, setting a then world record for the largest crowd to ever witness a single sporting event.

Opening of the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens

The United States sent 14 athletes to Athens in 1896, all of them being either undergraduate students from Harvard or Princeton Universities, or rank amateurs, most of whom were members of the Boston Athletic Association and competed in their respective sports at nights and on the weekends after clocking out of work.

Of the fourteen American athletes to participate in the Games of the First Olympiad in 1896, all but two would win medals, and the United States of America would dominate the competition by accumulating an astounding eleven gold medals against heavily favored athletes with experience in international competitions from Great Britain, France, Greece and Germany among other more well-established European nations.  

To put the American gold medal count in perspective, the United States team with only 14 athletes won 11 gold medals, while the closest runner up, the host nation of Greece, which fielded a contingent of 169 athletes finished with 10 gold medals.

A Medal from the First Modern Olympics 1896

Among the amateur Americans who distinguished themselves at the games of the first modern Olympiad in 1896 was Ellery Clark, who took a leave of absence from his classes at Harvard, and then went on to win the gold medal in both the long jump and high jump competitions.  He is still the only person to ever win both of these events.  Ellery Clark would go on to live the rest of his life as an alderman for the city of Boston.

There was Robert Garrett, a student at Princeton University, who prior to the 1896 Olympic Games had never even seen a discus in person, let alone thrown one before, but who in front of a crowd of upwards of 100,000 spectators would go on to win Olympic gold in both the discus and shot put competitions.

One young American athlete from Connecticut, Bill Hoyt whose grades were considered subpar, had to fake an illness just so he could obtain a leave of absence from his classes at Harvard to compete in the pole vault event.  He won gold in Athens and would go on to serve with distinction in France during the First World War.

There was Gardner Williams, the lone swimmer who made up the American contingent and also forty-year old Charles Waldstein, a graduate of Columbia University, who competed in shooting, gymnastics and track and field and also served as a referee for both the tennis and cycling competitions.

But among all the memorable, remarkable and improbable American performances at the first modern day Olympic Games in 1896, perhaps none were more memorable or noteworthy than that of Summer Paine and his brother John.

Summer Paine was born in 1868 and his younger brother John was born two years later in 1870.  Their father was Charles Jackson Paine who had been a distinguished Union General during the American Civil War and they were descendants of Robert Treat Paine, one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Given the patriotic American pedigree of the Paine family, it should come as no surprise that in early 1896 upon first hearing that the Olympic Games would be held that year in Athens, John Paine instantly determined that he wanted to compete as a sport shooter representing the United States.

John Paine jumped aboard a freighter and travelled across the Atlantic to France where his brother Summer, who had dropped out of Harvard a few years earlier, was working as a gunsmith in Paris.  He surprised his brother at work and told him of his plans to compete in the upcoming Olympic Games.

At the time, Summer Paine regularly competed in marksmanship competitions in and around Paris, and had completely immersed himself in the crafting, studying and selling of firearms.  Privately, it was said that Summer Paine considered himself to be the best marksman in all the world.

But when his brother John showed up at his doorstep one day in February of 1896 Summer had to admit that, in his own words, he had, “(N)ever even heard of the upcoming Olympic games,” and that he was initially, “shocked by it all because John had neglected to even inform him that he was en route to Paris!” (Quoted from the Official History of the Olympics: The Olympic Century pub. 1998)

Despite his initial shock, always up for a challenge, Summer Paine readily agreed to participate alongside his brother John as a sport shooter representing the United States of America at the first Olympic Games in Athens that April.

1896 US Olympic Team: Paine Brother Seated on the Ground

There was only one problem.  With less than two months to go until the start of the Olympic Games the Paine brothers still had no idea exactly what type of shooting events they would be competing in or what specific type of firearms they would need.

In an attempt to compensate for their lack of knowledge about what they were getting themselves into, the Paine brothers would bring eight different weapons, as well as 3,500 rounds of ammunition, with them to Athens.  In all, during the Olympics, John and Summer Paine would fire a total of 96 rounds of ammunition.

Travelling overland, mostly by train but in some instances even on foot, the Paine brothers didn’t arrive in Athens until April 7, 1896 the day before the shooting events were set to begin.

On April 8, John and Summer Paine were disqualified from the first event they entered for not using the proper firearms.  Additionally, to their horror, once in Athens the Paine brothers discovered that the Olympic targets were much smaller than the ones they had practiced on while in France.  On top of all of this, to add insult to injury, the guns that Summer and John had brought with them to the 1896 Olympic Games were made of a highly polished chrome finish, while the other sport shooters all used guns of a matte black finish since the bright Meditteranean Greek sun produced a blinding glare when if reflected off polished metals.

Not deterred, John and Summer Paine fixed the problem of reflective chrome by covering their revolvers in the soot of burnt matches and by the second day of competition the Paine brothers began to stand apart as the best shooters in the field.

After their initial disqualification the Paine Brothers would go on to dominate the field even while both took long swigs of whiskey from a hip flask between shots.

John Paine placed first in the 25 meter military revolver shooting competition while his brother Summer placed second.  In the very next event, the 30 meter target shooting competition, the brothers switched spots with Summer placing first while John came up second.

The Paine Brother’s individual scores in both the military and target revolver events more than doubled the scores of the third place finisher.

In the Olympic Games final shooting competition, the free pistol match, John not wishing to any longer compete against his own brother, withdrew from the competition and Summer proceeded to handily win the event.

John and Summer Paine returned home to the United States to a hero’s welcome, but for the members of the 1896 U.S. Olympic Team, no endorsements were waiting and no professional sports careers loomed on the horizon.  Some would become local celebrities for a time and a few would go on to compete at the Second Olympiad in Paris held in 1900, but most like Summer and John Paine would fade into anonymity after their brief initial moment of Olympic glory.

Team USA returns home from the 1896 Olympics

However, the odd Olympic story of sport-shooter Summer Paine would have two more ironic and tragic twists.  Soon after winning gold at the 1896 Olympic Games Summer would  move back to the United States to try his hand at being a gunsmith in America. 

In 1901, only six years after winning gold in Athens, Summer would arrive home and find his wife in bed with their daughter’s music teacher.  Paine, who obviously was always armed, fired four shots in the general direction of the man he had discovered in flagrante with his wife before chasing him out of his house.

Soon after the domestic incident Summer Paine was arrested and jailed on the charge of attempted manslaughter.

When detectives questioned Paine he insisted that he had never met the man before and only fired, “warning shots designed to scare him.”  He further claimed that he never intended to kill or hurt his wife’s illicit lover at all.

Despite Summer Paine’s protestations he was held in jail until his Olympic past came to light and his case was then summarily dismissed. All charges against him were eventually dropped when it was decided that since Summer Paine had proven himself to be such a great shot in Olympic competition that he obviously could not have accidentally missed a man with four shots from a revolver at such close range.

Though Summer Paine would be acquitted of the charge of attempted murder he would go on to pass away from pneumonia only four years later at the young age of thirty-five, a broken and heart-sick man.

John Paine would live until 1951 when he would pass away at the ripe old age of eighty-one.  After the Olympics, John Paine would serve under Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough-Riders during the Spanish-American War in 1898.  Eventually, he would settle in his native Boston and become a prosperous and wealthy investment banker.

The great-granddaughter of John Paine and the great-grandniece of Summer Paine, Cecile Tucker, would compete 100 years later during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia for Team USA in a rowing event.