Lloyd Phillips

William Lloyd Phillips was born in Newport on 8 September, 1881, and is now recognised as the first official Welsh competitor at the modern Olympic Games. It took some painstaking research by Olympic historians to discover the back story to the man previously only ever referred to as ‘Phillips’ in the British team of four gymnasts who went to Paris for the second modern Olympiad in 1900.

The true identity of Lloyd Phillips, as he was widely known, was unearthed in the 2020s. He was the champion gymnast of the German Gymnasium in London in 1901, England’s first purpose-built gymnasium. The King’s Cross-based gym was funded solely by London’s German community in 1865. It still stands to this day, but is now a restaurant.

He was fourth at the 1901 and 1902 British Championships and second in 1903. He competed for England in 1902 in the Home Nations international, but switched to his native Wales in 1903 when they entered the competition.

He finished in 73rd place in the all-round competition at the Vélodrome Municipal de Vincennes at the 1900 Olympic Games. That placed him third among the British gymnasts in a field of 135 competitors, all of who took part in 16 events.

But more significantly, his performances over two days on 29 &30 July 1900 earned him the honour of becoming the first Welsh athlete to take part in the Olympic Games.

The Aberaman-born cyclist Tom Linton also took part in Paris in 1900, but he rode in three professional events in September for which official medals were not awarded. It was the same story with Syd Jenkins, who took part in the sprints much later in the year.

Previously it was understood the honour of being the first Welshmen to become Olympians belonged to the great swimmer and water-polo player, Paulo Radmilovic, and the high hurdler Wallis Walters at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens.

Renowned for his work on the horizontal bars and rings, Lloyd Phillips turned professional in 1903. In 1907 became a director of the The Royal Medical Gymnasium in Boscome, along with Harry Counter. It was advertised as a high-class fencing and boxing academy that also specialised in exercises for spinal curvature, wry neck and other physical deformities.

He married and settled down in the town of Bournemouth, but in 1911 he eloped with his American mistress, Clara Hyams, to New South Wales. Hyams had lived in England since her father had been cleared of the brutal murder of an employee in Toronto some years earlier.

He found success in Australia as the Physical Education director of the Brisbane YMCA before being lured to New Zealand, where he performed various roles for Otago’s YMCA system.

He was called up to the New Zealand Army in 1918, but the war ended whilst he was still in training, so he returned to his old job having negotiated a pay rise. In 1920, Lloyd and Clara made another change in location as they moved to Rutherford, New Jersey.

He worked for the YMCA there before moving on to become the physical instructor for the Bedford branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn.

He eventually died, aged 85, in Florida in 1966.