Frank Havens (born August 1, 1924) is an American sprint canoer who competed from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Destined to compete in the Olympic Games since the day he was born, Frank Havens had the rare distinction of being a four-time Olympian. His father (William Dodge Havens Sr.(Bill)) was scheduled to compete in the Olympics in 1924, but did not for fear of missing his son’s debut into the world. Many years later in the 1952 Olympic Games at Helsinki, Finland, Frank Havens won the grueling 10,000-meter Canadian single-blade race in 57 minutes and 41 seconds. He broke the world record set by Czechoslovakia’s Frantisek Capek. Havens proudly presented the gold medal to his father, thanking him for waiting around until he was born. Competing in four Summer Olympics, he won two medals in the C-1 10000 m event with a gold in 1952 and a silver in 1948. In Haven’s first shot in the 1948 Olympic games, he finished second to Capek by 35.4 seconds in a canoe he borrowed from the Czechs. In 1952, his world record was set in a canoe he and his brother, Bill, imported from Sweden for about $160.00.
He is, as of 2011, the only American Olympic gold medal winner in a singles canoeing event.
He is a member of the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Famous quotes containing the words frank and/or havens:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)