CASES FOR MAIGRET

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31803, 7 October 1968, Page 4 (Supplement)

CASES FOR MAIGRET

If there were an Olympic library it would probably stock the following best sellers in its mystery section:

“Did the Baker Boy Cook up Something?” “Who fired the Sixth Bullet?”

“The Missing Strides in the March.” The baker boy was a Frenchman, Michael Teato, who, some claim, knew his way too well around Bois de Boulogne marathon course in 1900. The American Arthur Newton took the lead at midway and was never passed. But instead of being greeted as the winner he found that Teato—he was declared the winner —and two other Frenchmen and a Swede were waiting for him.

That mystery has never been solved nor was the firing of the sixth bullet in the modern pentathlon in Tokyo of 64 years later.

Six bullet holes were found on the target of O. Torok, of Hungary, when only five were allowed. Torok denied, and so did the marshall in charge, that an extra shot had been fired.

The West Melbourne stadium too had a mystery eight years before. The track suit of the United States gymnast—Muriel Davis—disappeared.

So desperate did the situation become that the announcer, with words that will never rank with the Gettysburg address, but were more to the point told the crowd: “Miss Davis refuses to march on without her pants.”