The International Society of Olympic Historians has conferred a rare honour on Australia’s Harry Gordon, official historian on the Australian Olympic Committee.

Gordon, also a well-known journalist, editor and author, has been named as this year’s recipient of the ISOH Lifetime Award, which recognises outstanding work in the field of Olympic history.

The ISOH executive committee, which includes eminent Olympic historians and scholars from around the world, and is linked to the International Olympic Committee, voted unanimously to name Gordon as recipient of the 2006 award.

This is the second year the ISOH Lifetime Award has been given. The previous recipient, for 2005, was IOC vice-president Richard Pound, author of two major books and many papers on Olympic history. Pound was presented with the award during the Torino Winter Olympics by Dr Karl Lennartz, president of the ISOH.

Announcing the award to Harry Gordon in Cologne, Germany, Dr Lennartz said he was being honoured for his work on the Olympic history of Australia and his commitment to the International Society of Olympic Historians.

Among Gordon’s 14 books have been five on the Olympic Games, including the landmark “Australia and the Olympic Games” and its sequel, “The Time of our Lives”. He has also written a biography of Dawn Fraser and a history of the Hawthorn Football Club. His “An Eyewitness History of Australia” won the National Book Council’s first prize for Australian literature.

His Olympic involvement began as a journalist covering the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. He helped plan press facilities for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. For six years before the Sydney 2000 Games he lectured on Games history at Olympic academies around Australia.

Gordon helped plan the Olympic torch relay for those Games, and named the streets at Olympic Park and in the Olympic Village. Early this year he named another 37 streets and parklands in the Olympic Park precinct. In 2001the IOC awarded him its Olympic Order, and in 2002 he received the Australian Sports Commission’s inaugural award for Lifetime Achievement in Sports Writing. He has declined an invitation to travel to Cologne for presentation of the 2006 ISOH Lifetime Award, opting instead to receive it later in the year in Australia.

Harry Gordon is a former editor of the Melbourne Sun, editor-in-chief of both the Herald and Weekly Times (Melbourne) and Queensland Newspapers (Brisbane), and chairman of Australian Associated Press. He now lives on the Gold Coast.

In December 2005, Gordon wrote profiles on 50 of Australia's finest Olympians to honour some of the phenominal Australian Olympians. To read these profiles click here.

AOC