Kiviat Is Oldest Living Medalist

The most strenuous exercise Abel R. Kiviat gets these days is walking 200 feet to the mailbox and back at his Lakehurst, N.J., residence. The next most strenuous exercise he gets is the 150-foot, round-trip journey to the trash bin.

Some people count the miles they run. Abel R. Kiviat counts the steps he takes.

“I don’t do walking, I don’t take any exercise,” he said, pride in his craggy voice.

He’s earned the right. At the age of 97, Kiviat is the oldest living Olympic medalist. He was nosed out of a gold medal in the 1912 Stockholm Games when a fast-finishing Englishman named A.N.S. Jackson took the 1,500-meter run in 3:56.8. Kiviat’s 3:56.9 barely held off U.S. teammate Norman Taber for the silver.

Kiviat took some consolation -- but not much -- when the United States won the 3,000-meter team event. He got a gold even though his time was not among the top three scoring times for the United States.

Kiviat was at Essex Community College this week to help kick off Fitness Month and Older Americans Month on Senior Fitness Day, and to talk about his silver medal and his longevity.

He is a monument to clean living. Well, relatively speaking, anyway. Aside from the glass of John Dewars scotch (on the rocks) and two Optimo Admiral cigars he allows himself each day, he has no other admitted vices.

At the least, Kiviat, who turns 98 on June 23, is the product of good genes. The son of Russian immigrants, Abel has a sister still living who is 96 and a brother -- the baby in the family -- who is 86. His son, Arthur, will be 76 on Christmas Day. His mother lived to be 81, while his father died at the tender age of 66.

“I’ve been lucky,” Kiviat said several times during a two-hour reminisce.

He wasn’t kidding. He survived World War I as a buck private in a supply outfit in France. “Promoted three times,” Kiviat remembered, “busted three times.”

One fateful night, he was scheduled to be in a threesome that drove ammunition to the front. He let another soldier go in his place, though. “He was an Irish boy,” Kiviat said. “He made the suggestion (to switch).”

The truck ran over a mine that night and all three people in it were killed.

Asked to what he attributes his longevity, Kiviat repeats this litany:

“I used no condiments. I got plenty of sleep. And I kept my nose clean, after I had it broken playing football and baseball.”

Although he says he was less than 5 feet tall and under 100 pounds at the time he competed in the 1912 Games, Kiviat was quite an athlete. He was an accomplished shortstop at Curtis High School in Staten Island, N.Y.

According to Glenn Kasper, who regularly accompanies Kiviat on speaking engagements as deputy director of the New Jersey Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness & Sports, Abel was being scouted by the Yankees.

As the story goes, Kiviat got his start in track after winning a challenge race against a member of the Curtis track team. He became New York City’s mile and 880 champion as a prep runner, and then was invited by Lawson Robertson to join the Irish American Athletic Club. Kiviat was the only Jewish athlete on what he calls the “poor man’s track club.”

According to Kasper, Kiviat went undefeated in every race he entered in 1911. He set a world record for the 1,500-meter run in the U.S. Olympic trials at Harvard Stadium in 1912, a record that stood until 1930.

And he was favored to take the gold in Sweden. As the race was described in “The Story of the Olympic Games, 776 B.C. to 1964” by John Kieran and Arthur Daley, he took the lead in the bell lap and ran down the stretch with teammates Taber and John Paul Jones abreast of him.

Great Britain’s Jackson passed them all, however, on the final turn.

“I remember it vividly,” Kiviat said. “In fact, I had nightmares about it.”

There were no Olympics in 1916, and Kiviat didn’t get around to competing again until 1924. At that point, his career effectively ended when he was asked to run the steeplechase in the trials. He promptly hit a hurdle, fell into the next water hole, and suffered a badly sprained ankle.

Kiviat worked a number of jobs in the ensuing years -- he was a sporting goods salesman for Wanamaker’s and worked in the New York Stock Exchange -- before settling in for 41 years with the government as a court clerk. He retired at age 71. Some eight years ago, Olympic historian Stan Saplan looked up the forgotten Kiviat and Abel has been making appearances ever since.

In 1988, Kiviat, who had lost his Olympic medals, received replicas from the great grandson of the king of Sweden, who had initially given him the medals. In 1989, he met President Bush and was a torch bearer at the U.S. Olympic Festival in Oklahoma City. And, if all goes well, he will lead the U.S. Olympic delegation at the ’92 Games in Barcelona.

He will be 100 in 1992.