Ludovic Augustin: Haiti’s Olympic Medalist Before Sylvio Cator

The name no longer means much to many people. Yet it appears in the records of the Games of the VIII Olympiad. On August 25, 1926, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a 24-year-old lieutenant in the Gendarmerie d’Haïti died at the Hospice Saint-François de Sales in Port-au-Prince. Two summers earlier, he had been the top scorer on a Haitian team that reached an Olympic podium. Exactly 100 years after his death, collective memory has retained Sylvio Cator, silver medalist in the long jump in Amsterdam in 1928. It has forgotten Ludovic Augustin.