Individual All-Around, Men

The individual championship was known in the Official Report as “The Heptathlon” because it encompassed seven events, although they were conducted on only five apparatuses. The winner was the Italian Alberto Braglia, who had been runner-up in both individual events at the 1906 Olympics in Athens. An article in a Birmingham newspaper noted that Braglia “scored 16 points in the rope climb and 67 of a maximum 72 on the pommel horse.”

Braglia used his Olympic fame to become a circus performer. Working on a trapeze, he sustained a serious injury from a fall in 1910. But he recovered from that setback to return in 1912 at Stockholm, where he defended his Olympic title in individual gymnastics. He then turned professional, returning to the circus as an acrobat. Braglia later returned to gymnastics and coached the Italian team at the 1932 Olympics.

Full results of this event were not available until March 2020, and were not originally published in the Mallon/Buchanan book The 1908 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary (McFarland, 2000). Hilary Evans, one of the OlyMADMen, discovered them in an obscure French newspaper/journal Les Jeunes : courrier de quinzaine du journal “Le Patronage”, the journal of the Fédération sportive et culturelle de France from 8 August 1908. They can be seen here.

The late Ian Buchanan once said that “we would find them [1908 individual gymnastics results] somewhere - perhaps in somebody’s attic.” Ian is certainly smiling down upon us, knowing that the full results of the 1908 Olympics are now complete with the addition of these results.