Province’s most capped AB Jumper banned from Olympics by Nazis

FORMER All Black Tom Lister, who died in Timaru this week aged 73, after a short battle with cancer, was man of many parts.

A onetime rubbish collector in his younger days, Lister was also a meat worker, fisherman and then a farmer later in life.

But he is best remembered as a tough, nononsense rugby player and South Canterbury’s mostcapped All Black, logging 26 games and eight tests at flanker from 196871.

He was also a driving force behind the province’s only Ranfurly Shield tenure in 1974.

He was renowned for being extremely fit, a legacy of his days working on a rubbish truck in Wellington.

Born in Ashburton in October 1943, Lister attended Temuka Primary School and then Waitaki Boys’ High School and debuted for South Canterbury in 1962. His record as the youngest forward selected for the province, at the age of 18 years, eight months and nine days, remains unbroken.

He moved to Wellington in 1965 to improve his chances of All Black selection and was finally named in 1968 to play against Australia in Sydney.

According to Wikipedia, he played in both tests in his first All Black tour that year and also played two tests against Wales in 1969 and two more against South Africa in 1970.

His final international match was the fourth test against the 1971 Lions, his All Black career ending with a try. In his All Black career he played a total of 26 games, eight of them test matches. He totalled 33 points (11 tries), scoring two tries in test matches.

Lister might have played more tests for New Zealand, but was up against some of our greatest All Blacks — Brian Lochore, Kel Tremain, Waka Nathan, Ian Kirkpatrick and Alex Wyllie — for the loose forward positions.

He retired in 1972, but returned the following year and was part of South Canterbury’s successful Ranfurly Shield challenge against Marlborough, then two defences against North Otago (won 93) and Wellington (lost 93).

Lister, who was named South Canterbury Sportsperson of the Year in 1969, retired for good after the 1974 season, having played 40 games for Wellington and 72 for the greenandblacks.

Young brother John was one of New Zealand’s top professional golfers through the 1970s and early ’80s, winning three NZ PGA Championship titles.

—The New Zealand Herald MARGARET LAMBERT had just won the high jump at the 1934 British Championships and was travelling with her father in the outskirts of London when she first saw published reports declaring the news.

The Nazi party in Germany had just completed a purge of its political opponents, consolidating power for Adolf Hitler. Which is why what her father told her next was so shocking.

Lambert — then Gretel Bergmann — was Jewish and did not expect to return to the country in which she was born. But her father said they had received a letter from the Nazi government demanding that she come back to Germany.

Lambert, one of the premier high jumpers in the world, was specially requested to join the German Olympic team in a bid to paint the Nazis as nondiscriminatory, and thus avoid a boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the United States and other countries.

One problem: ‘‘It was a sham,’’ she said 60 years later in a video interview published by the USC Shoah Foundation.

Lambert (103) died in her New York home in Queens recently. She never did make it to the Olympics — barred by a regime which could not bear the thought of a victory by a Jewish athlete — but nonetheless proved that she was probably the best in the world.

At the national trials in Stuttgart a month before the Olympics, she matched a German record with a jump of 1.60m, which ended up being the winning mark at that year’s games in Berlin. She did it ‘‘with the greatest of ease,’’ Lambert said.

Shortly after, she received a letter from the German national sports association saying she would be left off the team: ‘‘Looking back on your most recent performance, you could not possibly have expected to be chosen for the team,’’ it read, followed by a ‘‘Heil Hitler!’’

‘‘As soon as the Americans were on the boat going to Germany, I got the letter — addressed on the 16th of July — that I wasn’t good enough . . . [the American team] sailed on the 15th of July,’’ thus ensuring there would be no boycott of the Berlin Olympics, she said.

Though Lambert never did win her gold medal, her legacy lived on.

Lambert was born on April 12, 1914, in Laupheim, Germany, to Edwin and Paula Stern Bergmann and as a young girl excelled at athletics but in 1933, seemingly overnight, Jews were banned from most public spaces, including German athletic clubs.

After beginning school in England later that year, she returned to Germany for her thwarted attempt at Olympic gold. She moved to the United States in 1937.

She married Dr Bruno Lambert — a sprinter she had met in an Olympic training camp — a year later. Bruno died in 2013, aged 103.

In 1995, a sports complex in Berlin was named after her. She did not go to the ceremony.

In 1996, she relented slightly, agreeing to light the Olympic torch as a representative for Team Germany at the Olympics in Atlanta and in 1999, at the behest of her sons, Glenn and Gary, she attended the dedication of Gretel Bergmann Stadium in Laupheim, Germany.

In 2004 her story was the subject of an HBO documentary, Hitler’s Pawn, and in 2009, her German national high jump record of 1.60m was restored.

Lambert is survived by her sons, two grandchildren and a greatgrandson. — Newsday.