As one Olympic silver medal for sailing heads for Ireland,
another gold is poised to leave here for the US.
The departing medal was won in the 1948 London Olympic Games, sometimes known as the austerity Olympics due to the straitened post-war times in which they were held. How the medal ended up in Ireland, and its imminent journey to the US, is a story in itself.
The medal was won by the five-man US sailing team competing in the six-metre event in Torbay, off the coast of Devon.
Their yacht, the Llanoria, and all five crew members – helmsman and owner Herman Whiton, and yachting colleagues Alfred Loomis, Michael Mooney, James Smith and James Weekes – were members of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, founded in New York in 1871, a temple to the virtues of sportsmanship and spirited amateurism.
There was nothing amateurish about the 1948 achievement of the Llanoria, however. The crew held off 58 other competitors in 10 boats representing 10 other countries, Argentina taking silver and Finland taking bronze.
Sudden death
In 1962, crewman James Weekes, who came from Oyster Bay in Long Island, married an Irish woman, Kay, and lived with her lived in Sandycove, Co Dublin, until his sudden death in 1977, aged 65.
Kay Weekes became a patient of Dublin urologist Dermot O'Flynn, a keen sailor and one-time president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). In gratitude to him, three years after the death of her husband, she gave James Weekes's 1948 Olympic gold medal to him.
In a letter gifting him the medal, she wrote: “This token comes with my deep affection . . . no other man deserves it better other than the one who won it.”
She noted that there were no sailors in her family – she and James did not have children – but, aware of Dr O’Flynn’s love of the water, felt it was appropriate that he receive it.
“Hand it down to one of yours when the time comes,” she urged.
That time came in January last year when Dr O’Flynn died at the great age of 93 and the medal went to his son, also named Dermot, director of professional development and corporate training at, coincidentally, the RCSI and, like his father, a keen sailor.
Initially,O’Flynn didn’t know what to do with his bequest.
“After putting the medal under lock and key for a while, I came to the decision that the medal did not belong to me,” he said.
He resolved that it belonged rightfully to James Weekes’s former club, Seawanhaka Yacht Club of New York, a realisation that was the start of, as he notes, “a journey of discovery”.
That journey led him to the Seawanhaka YC on the north shore of Long Island, whose members today include Townsend Weekes, a nephew of James and his only known descendant.
Further good luck unearthed the news that the Llanoria was still going strong and in fact had recently been totally refurbished by her current owner, Peter Hofmann, whose family had purchased her in 1980.
At Hofmann's invitation, O'Flynn had the pleasure of sailing on the Llanoria on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland in July.
Stellar career
In fact, the
Llanoria
has had, and continues to have, a stellar career: fresh from her 1948 gold, she took another gold in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
Last year, she won the six- metre 2015 World Championships and is the current European champion.
The 1948 medal that started it all will end its – and Dermot O'Flynn's – journey in October at a ceremony at the Seawanhaka Yacht Club marking the inauguration of the annual James Weekes Olympic Gold Medal Memorial Trophy, created by Sé O'Donoghue of Dacapo and containing the original 1948 Olympic Games gold medal.
“It will be a very great moment,” says O’Flynn, “and the right thing to do”.
