Bausch, James A. B.

Football, Track and field

b. March 29, 1906, Marion, SD,  d. July 9, 1974

One of the very few athletes in the halls of fame for two different sports, Bausch competed in basketball, football and track at Wichita University before transferring to Kansas University. A fullback, he set a Kansas scoring record in 1930.

He also threw the discus, javelin, and shot on the track team, but he wasn't quite good enough to win a national championship, so he became a multi-event competitor, winning the national pentathlon in 1931 and the national decathlon in 1932. At the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, he set a new world record of 8,462 points in the decathlon with great scores in the field events. His best performance was a pole vault of 13 feet, 1 1/2 inches, which would have been good for fifth place in the Olympic vault competition. Bausch won the 1932 Sullivan award as the nation's top amateur athlete.

As a direct result of his Olympic victory, the decathlon scoring tables were revised to give more weight to track events.

Source: HickokSports.com Biography