Seventy-five years after Glenn Morris won the Olympic decathlon at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games, the former Colorado State University three-sport athlete and student body president will be honored Friday when the school officially renames its field house after him.
The ceremony, open to the public, will be at 11:30 a.m. at the field house on the east side of the campus.
“We are proud to honor Glenn Morris, one of the greatest athletes in Olympic history and a proud graduate of our university, by attaching his name to CSU’s historic field house, school president Tony Frank said in a statement.
Morris was raised on several farms in the Simla area before heading to CSU, then known as Colorado A&M. He was a star end in football and broke several records in track and field, and graduated in 1935. He did much of his training on the Fort Collins campus and he won the decathlon in Berlin, setting both world and Olympic records. He beat out multiple Gold medalist Jesse Owens for that year’s Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete.
Morris returned to Colorado a hero and was honored with several fetes around the state, including a ticker tape parade in Denver. He also briefly tried pro football with the Detroit Lions, played Tarzan in a movie, served in the Navy during World War II, settled in California and died at age 61 in 1974.
