ON SUNDAY JULY 20, 1924, 12,000 spectators—the men in bowler hats, the buttoned-up women twirling parasols—crept forward at Paris’ sold-out, swelteringly hot Piscine des Tourelles outdoor stadium, waiting on the upraised starter’s gun. Hollywood’s Doug Fairbanks Jr., and Mary Pickford, and famous sprinter Charlie Paddock, just dethroned as the world’s fastest man, sat in lower boxes, hoping their old friend had one more miracle in him. In one of the last events in a sprawling and spotty three-weeks-long 8th Olympiad, the august French Olympic Games director Count Clary was unmissable with his wizard length white beard. The Games architect, the diminutive and often melancholic Baron Pierre de Coubertin, sat delighted by the arena’s positive energy. Italian fascist displays and spectator riots tainted the previous weeks, but this was golden, each customer a part of something greater. It was like a first-order Fresnel lens, bending many points of light into a singular beam so strong and luminous it could cut through the darkness of a stormy sea.

   All had turned out despite an ongoing heat wave that scorched the city that day with 100-degree temperatures. On tap was the long awaited 100-meter swimming showdown between Chicago’s brash world record holder Johnny Weissmuller and Hawaii’s stoic Duke Kahanamoku, the two-time defending Olympic sprint champ.

  The two stood poised for the first time ever in adjacent middle lanes on the edge of the pool deck, the 50-meter sheet of water in front of them separated by strands of floating cork, a simple but crucial innovation to prevent the oft-happening chaos of exhausted or spiteful racers thrashing into one another. Boilers installed only weeks earlier heated the water to a race-optimum 70 degrees.

   Crouched in their knee-bent forward stances, their arms retracted behind them like airplane wings, Duke and Johnny were strikingly handsome. In their chiseled, 6-foot-plus frames, their pectoral and shoulder muscles outlined in form fitting one piece bathing suits, each was hard to keep eyes off of. They were the glistening homo erotic illustrations of J.C. Leyendecker come to life. Coming out of era where leisure-seeking beach goers often lay in the hot white sand in full dark suits, their female companions safely segregated behind ropes on separate beaches, Duke, and now Johnny, looked the way a young man ached to look: physical and free and desirable.