James G.B. Merrick (1871-1946): Sports Organizer, Negotiator, Canada's Second IOC Member
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The Canadian Olympic Association (now Canadian Olympic Committee) was taken to task by Bruce Kidd in an article published in Olympika in 1994. (1) Kidd pointed out that poster widely distributed by as part of centenary of Modern Olympic Movement identifies Howard Crocker as COA President 1904, Kidd then paints a more historically accurate picture by pointing out that in 1904 there was no Canadian National Olympic Committee, nor was there a Canadian Olympic Association at that time. Kidd proceeds to point out that more correctly, Colonel John Hanbury-Williams should rightfully be considered first President of COA, and that Hanbury-Williams assumed this role in 1907 by virtue of being requested by Canada's Governor-General Earl Grey to organize a team for participation in London Games in 1908. Apparently, Governor-General had been asked by British Olympic Committee to undertake organization of a Canadian team and he, in turn, delegated responsibility to Hanbury-Williams. Hanbury-Williams formed an initial committee consisting of P. D. Ross, publisher of Ottawa Journal and a Stanley Cup trustee, and Dr. Bruce Macdonald, principal of St Andrew's College and a member of University of Toronto Athletic Association. (2) As Kidd pointed out, an organizing committee was appointed to coordinate selection of Canadian Olympic team for 1908 Games. Howard Crocker then became a member of committee and Team Manager. William Stark, then President of Canadian Amateur Athletic Union and a City of Toronto deputy police chief was selected as team's Commissioner in London. In Kidd's words, This--and nothing else--should be considered first Canadian NOC. (3) Notwithstanding fact that Crocker was not first president, nor ever held president's office, Crocker had a truly outstanding and very significant career in Canadian sport. In 1908 Crocker worked for YMCA, he succeeded to become National YMCA Physical Director, spent a period of time in China, joined University of Western Ontario in 1930 as Director of Physical Education where he remained until his retirement in 1949. As Keyes pointed out in her biography of him: Crocker's work in AAU has covered nearly every committee and many of its executive offices. (4) Kidd makes a compelling case, and correctly so, to recognize Hanbury-Williams as first president of COA. Nevertheless, two other individuals, I would argue, make their own case to be recognized as the first president. These two individuals were both instrumental in creation of Canadian Olympic Committee/Association, and both were Canadian representatives of International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Canada. Sydney Dawes (1888-1948) was co-opted to IOC in 1947 and served until his resignation in 1967, and remained as an Honorary Member until his death in 1968. Dawes became president of Canadian Olympic Association when it was first established as an independent body separate from Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (AAUC) in 1947. Dawes served as president until 1953 and fostered incorporation and charter of COA. He is considered by some to be the Founder of Association. (5) James G. B. Merrick (1872-1946) was individual who negotiated an agreement between two warring factions of Canadian amateur sport and became first president of Amateur Athletic Union of Canada when it was established in 1911. Subsequently, Merrick was inducted into IOC in 1921 and served until his death in 1946. As MacDonald pointed out, Pierre de Coubertin urged AAU of C to create a permanent Canadian Olympic Committee; this committee was formed in 1913, and James Merrick became initial president/chair. The constitution of committee was framed in such a way as to give it independence from AAUC, although in a de facto manner members of both AAUC and COC were common. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".