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Philip A. Edwards, runner, physician (born 13 September 1907 in Georgetown, British Guiana; died 6 September 1971 in Montréal, Québec). In 1926, Phillip A. Edwards emigrated to the United States, where he enrolled in New York University (NYU). While studying at NYU, he competed and excelled in track and field. Two years after entering NYU, he became intercollegiate champion in the 880-yard (800-m) event.
Because British Guiana was not sending any athletes to the 1928 Amsterdam Summer Olympic Games, Edwards accepted an invitation to join the Canadian team. At these Olympics, this great black athlete earned his first medal when his team finished third in the 4 X 400-m relay.
Some time after his marriage, in 1929, Edwards decided to study medicine at McGill University in Montréal. Still a fast runner, he captained McGill’s track and field team from 1931 to 1936. During this period, he set a slew of Canadian records and competed in two Olympic Games: Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936. He also represented British Guiana at the British Empire Games (now known as the Commonwealth Games) in London in 1934, and when he crossed the finish line in the 880-yard event, he became the first black athlete ever to win a gold medal in these Games.
Edwards had an especially successful Olympics in Los Angeles. He came back to Canada with three bronze medals, won in the 800-m, 1500-m and 4 X 400-m events. Four years later, the tension was palpable in the Olympic stadium in Berlin, where black athletes competed in the face of a Nazi regime that proclaimed the supremacy of the white race. As history has recorded, black American athlete Jesse Owens put the lie to this doctrine by winning four gold medals. Philip Edwards did his part too, winning bronze in the 800-m event. In the 4 X 400-m relay, the Canadians came in fourth, tied with the German team.
At the end of 1936, as a result of his performance in Berlin, Edwards became the first winner of the Lou Marsh Trophy, which has since been awarded annually to Canada’s best athlete of the year. That same year, Edwards—by then known as “Bronze Man”--also won the Lionel Conacher Trophy as Canada’s best male athlete of the year.
During World War II, Edwards served as a captain in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. After the war ended, he worked at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal, and for a while in the early 1950s, he worked at the veteran’s hospital in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, where he met marathon runner Gérard Côté. Edwards advised Côté to adopt Edwards’s training method, to develop more speed.
Edwards died in 1971. It was not until some years later that this five-time Olympic-medal winner received appropriate recognition for his exploits: he was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Québec Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.
