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Bob Mathias was a very good young athlete with no real special event. At a relatively young age he was introduced to the decathlon, an event that consists of ten separate track and field events, conducted over two days. With very little experience, and at age 17, he won selection to the US team for the 1948 London Olympics. There he won the event, the youngest track and field gold medallist in Modern Olympic history. Four years later, with much more experience, he easily won the same event at the Helsinki Olympics.
Following his retirement from athletics, he drifted into acting, starting with a role he could do reasonably well: he played himself in a biopic. I recall him being Keenan Wynn's offsider in a television series of the late 1950s, yclept, I believe, The Troubleshooters. The premise of this show was that Wynn, together with his handsome and athletic off-sider, went in to rescue difficult work sites, like firey oil-wells or damaged mines, from disaster. Now that I think on it, it sounds like a weak premise for a weekly series but I think it lasted a season or two.
Subsequently Mathias must have joined the phalanx of the second-rate actors who drifted to Italy in the late 50s and early 60s to display their pectorals and lack of thespian talent in the series of films based on the mythological heroes of the ancient Mediterranean. In addition to Theseus there was at least one other part in an Italian movie. Thus, he joins the likes of Steve Reeves and Rock Stevens (aka Peter Lupus) in such movies.
In respect of the further distinguished career of the dual Olympic gold medallist, deponeth can say no more.
Further information indicates that he left acting (to everyone's benefit, including his own, and went to Congress as a Republic in 1967, serving three or four terms.
Anyone have anything to add to that?
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