I found this on Wikipedia under: John Eleuthère du Pont - convicted murderer
“In 1966 he founded the sport of triathlon in the United States. In just 20 years over one million athletes participated in this sport.”
Huh ?!?! This seems like total BS to me.
OK - Wikipedia doesn’t have a stellar reputation for accuracy, but this just seems too bizarre.
I’d go into Wikipedia and delete this, but thought I ought to bounce it off the slowtwitch group, just to be sure.
No that’s not corrrect. The best that I can recall is that he might have had something to do with sponsorship of a few triathlons and maybe a team back in the day. Also I think he may have backed the short lived “Tour du Pont” bike race back in the 80s.
Well, John DuPont was convicted of third degree murder for shooting David Schultz, an Olympic wrestler. DuPont, a very wealthy heir to the chemical-company fortune (great grandson of E.I DuPont) was mentally ill and obsessed with sports. At some point he was interested in triathlon, but I am not sure it is correct to say that he introduced triathlon to the US. He is a very strange character, and his murder of Schultz and his whole obsession with wrestling and other sports got a lot of press back in the late 90s when the murder occurred.
John Dupont was interested in a variety of sports which included wrestling,swimming,pentahalon, and triathlon. He did sponsor a major pro team (Foxcatcher) in the 80’s as well as swimming and wrestling. I have a few friends who raced for the triathlon team and a few that wrestled for the Foxcatcher team. He also sponsored the Olympic distance nationals a few times as well.The legend was that he did have some triathlons on his property in the 70’s which I assume used his 50 meter pool they had on the facility. A lot of people claim to have created triathlon but I would guess that a lot of people probably did a lot of workouts in the swim /bike/run format just for fun.