From Can’t-Miss to Obscurity for Ray

In 1913, every sports follower in Los Angeles agreed on one thing: Albert Ray was on his way to the 1916 Olympic Games. He’d won every road race around, including the Los Angeles Athletic Club’s 10-miler, 86 years ago today.

Ray, a Pima Indian from the Sherman Indian Institute in Riverside, was so far in front at the finish--at USC’s Bovard Field--that he strayed off course and was ordered to run two extra laps at the finish.

An LAAC writer, writing for the club’s Mercury magazine, called Ray “the greatest marathoner of his time.”

Ray and many other athletes of that era were cheated by history, of course. Due to World War I, there were no 1916 Games. For Ray, in fact, there would never be an Olympics.

In the summer of 1989, a writer researching the Ray story called the Sherman Institute, inquiring if material existed that would indicate what became of Ray.

Sadly, no one there had ever heard of him.

A call to Pima Tribal Headquarters in Arizona was directed to Elinor Whitter, a Pima library researcher. She was to provide the sad ending to the story.

Albert Ray was killed in action in France in 1917.

Also on this date: In 1969, Barbara Jo Rubin became the first woman jockey to win a parimutuel race in the United States when she won the ninth race in a photo finish at Charleston Race Track at Charleston, W. Va. She rode Cohesian, which paid $2.80, in a six-and-a-half furlong race, beating six male jockeys. Rubin’s first ride was to have been at Tropical Park in Florida earlier that year, but male jockeys staged a strike in protest of her being given a ride. . . . In 1981, Johnny Miller shot a then-record 14-under par to win the Glen Campbell Los Angeles Open by two strokes at Riviera. He earned $54,000. . . . In 1910, before 15,000 at Richmond, Calif., Ad Wolgast battered Battling Nelson for 40 rounds to win the world lightweight championship and earn a $12,000 purse.