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Who, What, Why: Who was Leonidas of Rhodes? 0

Michael Phelps has broken a 2,000-year-old Olympic record by surpassing the 12 individual titles won by Leonidas of Rhodes. Who was this athlete whose record has taken two millennia to beat, asks Jon Kelly?

Phelps has a total of 22 Olympic gold medals, but nine of these have come in relays - in terms of individual titles he has only just passed the greatest athlete of the ancient world.

Leonidas of Rhodes competed in four successive Olympiads in 164BC, 160BC, 156BC and 152BC and in each of these he won three different foot races.

An athlete who won three events at a single Olympics was known as a triastes, or tripler. There were only seven triastes and Leonidas is the only one known to have achieved the honour more than once. Remarkably, he was 36 when he did it on the fourth occasion - five years older than Phelps is today.

The three events at which he triumphed were the stadion, a sprint of roughly 200m; the diaulos, which was twice the distance of the stadion; and the longer hoplitodromos, or race in armour.

Jan 05, 2017
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The spy with no name d'lare 0

In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem finally tracked down the son, Erwin, she had abandoned as a baby 33 years earlier. She immediately travelled to London to meet him. What followed, writes Jeff Maysh, is an unbelievable story of deception and heartbreak.

It was a cold Saturday morning in April 1988 when a van full of detectives arrived outside the North London home of Erwin van Haarlem. The self-employed art dealer, 44, lived alone in sleepy Friern Barnet, a smattering of brick homes beside the grim North Circular ring road.

The Dutchman's apartment building on Silver Birch Close had become the centre of an investigation led by the British intelligence agency MI5. It suspected that Van Haarlem - whom neighbours described as an "oddball" - was not in the art business at all, but a sinister foreign agent.

Inside, Van Haarlem was hunched over a radio in his kitchen. He was still wearing his pyjamas, but his hair was parted neatly to one side. He was tuned in, as he was every morning, to a mysterious "number station". In his earpiece, a female voice recited numbers in Czech, followed by the blip-bleep of Morse code.