GB's youngest ever male Olympian remembers Rome 1960

This was not the case when Wallingford resident Ken Lester became Britain’s youngest male Olympian when he competed as a cox in Rome 1960, aged just 13 – a record he still holds today.
“Up until about 1984, rowing was not a particularly major Olympic sport; then in 1984, we started getting gold medals. It caught people’s imagination. There was no way near the hype and talk there is today,” says Ken.
Sat in his Wallingford home, which he shares with his wife Ros, the mayor of Wallingford, Ken, a retired fourth-generation butcher, recalls the Olympics like it was yesterday.
He joined Wallingford Rowing Club with his younger brother Richard after they became intrigued seeing rowers while on fishing trips.
He says that neither of them were particularly natural coxes – but later they were to both become very important members of the club.
“I loved it – but I wasn’t particularly good. We were quite a useful commodity to the senior members as they needed coxes.”
Not long after joining the club, Ken coxed a double skull at Wallingford Skiff Regatta, an event that he and his teammate won.
Little did he know that a telephone call a year later would cement his place in Olympic history. One of the guys he had coxed for at Wallingford decided to try out for the Olympic team with a friend from university as a rowing duo – and there was only one boy they wanted to cox for them.
“It was just out of the blue. I like to think they remembered me because I made their boat go straight,” says Ken.

Qualification took place in Henley and the team won.
After a month of intensive training, they flew to Rome.
“I had seen some films of Melbourne 1956 and I had read all the sports annuals so I was aware of the Olympics, but if somebody had told me on my 13th birthday that I would be going, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
His parents and sister joined him in Rome later, and Richard was the only member of the family who had to to stay at home. The extremely disappointed brother vowed then that he, too, would get to the Olympics one day.
And he did – at Montreal 1976, he eclipsed his big brother by winning a silver medal in the eights event.
The Rome Olympics kicked off with an opening ceremony, but Ken remembers that they were somewhat less extravagant affairs in those days.
His role, along with all competitors, was to march, in height order, from the Olympic village to the stadium.
“It was nothing like they are today. The flame was lit and the doves were released.”
But memories of that stadium have stayed with him: “It was huge; I had never been inside a stadium like that before.”
It was not the only time that, being so young, he felt overwhelmed by the experience. “I was mortified as some of the guys started smoking. I asked whether they were allowed to do that and they said it was a way of keeping their weight down. They were doing it during the ceremony.”
He also spent a lot of time exploring the city on his own, as the other athletes had hectic training schedules.
“I walked around. I didn’t get lost, it was very exciting. The Olympic village had its own cafeteria with little fridges with Coke and Fanta that you could just help yourself to – it was a real treat to have.
“One Saturday afternoon, all of the guys had gone on a coach trip somewhere. I didn’t go and I decided I would have lunch so I wandered into the restaurant. It was very quiet but somebody in a British tracksuit asked if he could sit with me – it was Don Thompson, the men’s 50km walk gold medallist. He told me that he trained in a steamy bathroom because he knew the race was going to be that hot.”
“I also saw Cassius Clay [the soon-to-be three-times world heavyweight boxing champion, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali]. It was only afterwards that I realised who he was – he was still an amateur.”
During the week-and-a-half in Rome before his family joined him, they communicated by letters. These form part of Wallingford Museum’s Olympic display, and a slightly
embarrassed Ken said: “They all start ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy’.”
Despite his tender age – or maybe because of it – he
didn’t always stick to the rules. After ‘illegally’ using his Olympic tracksuit and pass to pick up his family from the airport in a limousine, he also used sandbags to get him to the correct weight for a cox.
“The coxes had a minimum weight, I think of about eight stone, but I was only six stone so I had to carry sandbags around with me – to make it fair.
The trio came “third or fourth” in the first heat which meant they had to win the next race to get to the finals. They came third.
“We came very close in the end. We were quite disappointed not to get to the final. You go there and then there’s a natural thought progression that you are going home with a medal.
“We came home before the games ended. It was very strange going back home after the games – I was still a junior member of the rowing club.
“It feels great to have been part of it and it is something that isn’t going to go away.
In 2008, as young swimmer Tom Daley started to emerge as a British hopeful in the pool, many news reports claimed that he would become the youngest male Olympian if he competed in the Beijing Olympics.
Mrs Lester had something to say about that and, having put in a few telephone calls, the next morning Ken was on television, explaining that he was, in fact, 10 months younger than Daley.
The Lesters even got the chance to meet up with Daley, who had his photograph taken wearing the kit Ken wore on his record-making trip to Rome.
Talking about Daley, Ken said: “I was just so disappointed because in Beijing I thought he was going to get a medal – that would have made him the youngest to win a medal.”
Still proud to be Britain’s youngest male Olympian, the 65-year-old father and grandfather added: “If I could, I would love to still be doing it now. One day my record will get beaten – someone will come along. Records are there to be broken but it’s unlikely that there will be another cox.”