Taking Gold TO The Olympics

Molineux Men Who Stepped On To The Global Stage

Olympics 2012 – an outpouring of national pride for Neil Emblen.

We would love to hear from any readers who can tell us of any former Wolves player who became a star Olympian by appearing in the 100m final, winning a cycling medal or even making it on to the podium in the synchronised diving.

In the meantime, we will content ourselves with name-checking the favourites from these parts who we know to have competed at the Games via more predictable routes.

The presence in France over this last week or two of Darren Bazeley as head coach of the New Zealand men’s team had us scratching our heads to come up with other links between Molineux and what is often referred to as the greatest sports show on earth.

The Kiwis went out in the group stage as they followed up an opening victory over Guinea with defeats at the hands of the USA and hosts France.

Bazeley was at the Tokyo Games as assistant coach to the team after his good friend, Neil Emblen, had served as head coach when they came to the 2012 event in Britain.

Mid-1960s Wolves keeper (and later coach) Dave Maclaren oversaw Malaysia’s progress to the 1972 Munich Olympics when holding the same office and Les Wilson linked up with Tony Waiters and Bob McNab – the latter a Wolves left-back for a brief spell in he mid-1970s – to inspire Canada to a place in the last eight in Los Angeles 12 years later.

Steve Corica, the title-winning former head coach of A-League club Sydney and recently appointed by top-flight newcomers Auckland, played for Australia in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and then, after joining Wolves from Leicester, in the Atlanta version four years later.

The Queenslander, now 51, was in a side who narrowly missed out on the bronze medal in Spain and these days has Bobby Gould’s son, Jonathan – a man who went to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as a coach to the New Zealand football team – working at club level with him.

Bill Slater and Craig Dawson also figured in this sector of the Games before pitching up at Molineux. Slater famously wrote a report on the emerging threat of the Hungarians after seeing them at close quarters in the 1952 staging in Finland.

Despite a goal by the man who would move from Brentford to Wolves a few months later, Britain were defeated 5-3 in the preliminary round by Luxemburg, the supposed minnows then going on to put up a spirited fight before being eliminated 2-1 by Brazil. 

The 1960 Footballer of the Year has a particularly strong connection with the once-every-four-years spectacular. In his long post-playing career in sports administration, he was elected as a member of the National Olympic Committee and his daughter, Barbara, competed in the gymnastics event at the Montreal Games in 1976.

Dawson was on the fringes of the GB squad in the home Games of 2012 early in his career with Albion. He was restricted to brief tastes of action in the opening phase but then went on for Micah Richards after an hour of the knockout game against South Korea in Cardiff and had the satisfaction of scoring in the penalty shoot-out before it went against Stuart Pearce’s side 5-4.

Remember Rafa Mir? He may have had only the briefest of first-team careers on this patch but had Wolves as his parent club when picking up a silver medal at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. And he played a very full part in Spain’s impressive run by scoring an quarter-final injury-time equaliser against the Ivory Coast and then adding two goals in extra-time to complete his hat-trick and seal a 5–2 victory.

Reverend Kenneth Hunt – star of the summer of 1908.

And we shouldn’t forget that Raul Jimenez was part of Mexico’s gold medal line-up in London in 2012 well before he was recruited by Wolves. But one man did receive Olympic gold while at Molineux.

The improbably named Reverend Kenneth Hunt, the 1908 FA Cup final scorer and winner, was part of the Great Britain team who won the football tournament on home soil that same summer.

All the games were played at the White City and the side played only three games in emerging on top of the world, thrashing Sweden 12-1 and the Netherlands 4-0 to reach the gold medal match, at which a 10,000 crowd saw them overcome Denmark 2-0.

 

 

 

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