Russ Hodge, a former world-record holder in the decathlon who with his mother, the high jumper Alice Arden, became the first mother and son to have competed for the United States in the Olympics, died on May 6 in Johnson City, N.Y., near Binghamton. He was 86.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his family. The cause was complications of congestive heart failure and chronic kidney disease.
Hodge finished ninth in the decathlon at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the same position his mother had finished in the high jump at the 1936 Berlin Games.
Nicknamed Russell the Muscle for his 6-foot-3, 225-pound physique, he had a 17 ½-inch neck and a 33-inch waist and wore a size 52 jacket. He was said to be able to bench-press 500 pounds and squat 775 pounds, and to possess a rare vertical leap of 40 inches.
So diverse were his skills in the decathlon — made up of 10 running, throwing and jumping events that contest speed, strength and endurance — that Hodge remains the only decathlete to achieve a startling combination: He sprinted 100 meters in 10.2 seconds and threw the shot put more than 60 feet.
“He was a menace, so strong it was amazing,” Bill Toomey, the 1968 Olympic decathlon champion and a friend and rival of Hodge’s, said in an interview.
Despite his world record — set in 1966 with 8,230 points, which was surpassed a year later — Hodge’s injury-filled career was viewed by himself and others as one of unfulfilled brilliance. He did not qualify for another Olympic team after 1964. At critical moments before three subsequent Games, he suffered injuries to his thigh, hamstring and groin muscles, patellar tendon, elbow, ankle and collarbone.
He told The Sacramento Bee in 1983 that he used muscle-building steroids for a time in the 1960s, when they were not yet prohibited, “because everyone else did,” but they caused him muscle strains. He later spoke against performance-enhancing drugs and stressed that the vitamins and supplements sold by his nutrition business contained no banned substances.
Even though Hodge never realized his goals of becoming the first person to score 9,000 points in a decathlon and winning an Olympic medal, he did make history with his appearance at the 1964 Tokyo Games, 28 years after his mother competed in the 1936 Berlin Games.
Women were excluded when the modern Olympics began in 1896, then struggled for decades to attain something approaching equal access to the Games. According to the Olympic historian Bill Mallon, six pairs of mothers and sons from various countries competed in the Games before Hodge and his mother.
Eleven mothers and sons have competed in various sports at the Olympics for the United States, compared with 60 fathers and sons. Since Hodge and Arden, only one other mother and son have competed in the Olympics for the United States in track and field: Janis Klecker ran the marathon at the 1992 Barcelona Games, and her son Joe ran the 10,000 meters at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
Alice Arden arrived in Berlin in 1936 as a three-time American champion in the high jump, having leaped her career best of 5 feet 3 ½ inches in 1935.
In Depression-era America, Olympians were expected to pay part of their way to the Games, via fund-raising. Arden only secured her trip at the last minute, when she received $750 from a group of New York City lawyers (though she was reportedly required to return about $200 because of the rules governing amateurism at the time).
Arden jumped 4 ½ inches below her best during the high jump competition and finished tied for ninth. While in Berlin, she befriended Jesse Owens, the Black American sprinter whose four gold medals repudiated Hitler’s notion of Aryan supremacy.
Months after returning home, she met Russell Vincent Hodge while jumping center during an exhibition semiprofessional basketball game played between Arden’s Long Island Ducklings and Hodge’s Liberty Emeralds. The couple married in 1937 and ran a dairy farm, furniture store and gravel and sand business in Sullivan County, N.Y., in the Catskills.
Russell Arden Hodge was born on Sept. 12, 1939, in Monticello, N.Y., and grew up in the hamlet of Roscoe, about two hours northwest of New York City. When he was a boy, his mother took him and his brother James to track meets at Madison Square Garden and at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia.
Hodge discovered his dream event while watching the 1951 movie “Jim Thorpe — All-American,” starring Burt Lancaster as the Native American star who won the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.
“I came home and said to myself, that’s what I was going to do when I grow up,” Hodge told The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., in 2004.
He competed in his first decathlon in 1962, while serving in the Air Force. After the 1964 Games, he became an all-American at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose longtime coach Jim Bush told The Times in 1968 that Hodge was “the greatest natural athlete I’ve ever coached.” Hodge received a degree from U.C.L.A. in international relations in 1970 and served as an assistant coach and adviser to its track team.
He is survived by his wife, Pamela (Bleasdale) Hodge, whom he married in 1984; six children, April, Heather, Laura, Seth, Russell and Alice; his brother James; and two grandchildren.
His mother became a track and field official with the United States Olympic Committee in the 1950s, and continued to exercise regularly into her 90s. On visits to the Caribbean, her family said, she occasionally went jet skiing with a neighbor in Turks and Caicos: Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. She died in 2016 at 97.
Upon conceding in the mid-1970s that his best days as an athlete were behind him, Russ Hodge fell into a depression for a couple of years, he said in “Olympic Glory Denied” (1996), written by the decathlon expert Frank Zarnowski.
“I was never able to demonstrate what I was capable of doing,” Hodge told Zarnowski. “That’s what wiped me out emotionally.”
He added, “At 34 years of age, I realized that I was no longer in control of my life.”
He became a Christian and an ordained minister and served as an honorary chaplain for the United States Olympic team. He also helped to start an alumni fund for Olympians in need. In the late 1990s, Hodge returned to the Catskills and ran his nutrition business and a fitness center. He continued into his 60s to win medals in masters track and field competitions.
“I got involved in the spiritual part of life,” he said in 2006 to The Times Herald-Record, “and realized that I should be thankful for the ability that God had given me, which I wasn’t before.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
The post Russ Hodge Dies at 86; an Olympian, Like His Mother appeared first on New York Times.
