Jaffee's Olympic skating triumphs now a cautionary tale for athletes
Unlikely gold medallist who pawned his prizes saw how fleeting fame can be
Irving Jaffee's first real shot at an Olympic gold medal got bogged down in soft ice and red tape — a lasting regret, but not his biggest.
That came a few years later, when Jaffee went to a pawnshop and made a transaction he spent the rest of his life wishing he could undo.
But first: the speedskater, who grew up poor on the streets of New York, was primed to win the 10,000-metre event at the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He beat Norwegian world champion Bernt Evensen by one-10th of a second in their heat, and looked like the surefire gold medallist.
But an official ruled that because of sloppy, melting ice, the rest of the heats would be cancelled, and no medals awarded.
That decision kicked off “a day of bickering and dispute,” as The Associated Press put it, with the American delegation noting that 500m heats had run the day before in a low-visibility snowstorm, but medals were awarded nonetheless.
The decision to cancel was overturned and the International Olympic Committee declared Jaffee the champion. But a few hours after that, the International Skating Union intervened and declared that the competition's results were to be erased, and a new 10,000m race to be held. One problem: Most of the skaters had already left St. Moritz, and that was the end of that.
Evensen, for his part, said the gold medal should have been awarded to Jaffee — an unassuming sort who never had much in the way of money but was blessed with golden legs. His first skates, a pair of tubulars, were size 11. His feet were size 6.
“Take them. They will last you a long time,” Jaffee's father said, and the kid stuffed them with paper and cotton and went to work.
“Here,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle's Ed Hughes after Jaffee returned home from the 1928 Olympics, “was a youngster with but four and a half years of skating experience, limited, practically, to city rinks, who vanquished the greatest skaters of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Canada — `skating countries' — at their own game. It takes a real Olympic hero to accomplish such, and Jaffee is exactly that.”
Four years later, at the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, Jaffee finally got his gold medal. Two of them, in fact — one each in the 5,000 and 10,000m races. He literally dove across the finish line to nip his close-running competitors in the latter.
Jaffee never had a chance to enjoy those medals. He soon ran short on money, and pawned them to buy food for his family.
More than four decades later, in 1976, he contacted The Associated Press. Jaffee said he desperately wanted to buy back those medals, if only somebody knew where they were.
“I was ashamed to make this public,” he said, explaining the long delay in appealing for the return of his prizes.
“I had no job to go back to,” he added of those days after the 1932 Olympics.
“One day I marched down Fifth Avenue in New York, a national hero. The next day I was forgotten.”
Jaffee said he took his two gold medals, and many others he'd won through the years, to Kaskel's Pawn Shop in Harlem, where he received US$2,000. He had one year to pay the money back; otherwise, they'd sell them.
Jaffee couldn't come up with the funds and never saw his medals again. When he returned to the pawnshop a few years later, it was gone — the business and the building.
“I would wager there are hundreds of American athletes from impoverished families that have had to do this, even some today, because of our strict amateur rules,” said Jaffee, whose sole post- Olympics sponsorship was with Camel's cigarettes.
“I neglected my education to go to the Olympics,” he added. “I neglected steady jobs.”
Jaffee considered himself a cautionary tale: a real-life example of the pitfalls that can happen to Olympic heroes.
When he returned home, a tickertape parade was held for the American team along lower Broadway.
A few weeks after that, a celebrity — he didn't remember who — was being honoured in the same area, and Jaffee was part of a curious crowd.
“Back up there, buddy, where do you think you're going?” he recalled a policemen saying as he shoved the Olympian back.
“Somehow,” Jaffee told UPI in 1980, “I had the feeling that the cop who was pushing me back was the same one who had done the same thing to the crowd that was trying to get a look at me only a few weeks previous.
“It made me realize how fleeting fame can be.”
Jaffee lost one golden disc to a controversial decision, two more to a pawnshop, and died in 1981 without ever finding those medals. Periodic pleas to the media turned nothing up.
“I never would have sold them,” he told Newsday's Steve Jacobson. “But a man has to eat.”