In considering this fine book, it’s best not to dwell on the title. The central figures were not kings but Olympic swimmers: Johnny Weissmuller (whose claim to royalty consisted of portraying the “lord of the jungle” in the Tarzan movies), Duke Kahanamoku (whose noble status lay in his given name), and Katsuo Takaishi of Japan (an aquatic pioneer in his home country, but not an international champion like the other two).

Also beware the subtitle. These swimmers did not launch the “modern Olympic Age.” Much stronger candidates for that accolade include Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the Olympic movement in the 1890s; Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi, the winner of nine gold and three bronze medals in three different Olympiads in the 1920s; and American track-and-field wonder Jim Thorpe.

Putting aside these excesses of modern book marketing, Three Kings is a fun tale of three admirable people who competed against each other at the 1924 Paris Olympics. (The publisher’s publicity department will doubtless wish me to remind you that the Olympics are again happening in Paris right now, a centennial extravaganza you can celebrate with…this book!)

The two leading figures — Kahanamoku from Hawaii and Weissmuller from Eastern Europe by way of Chicago — were large men blessed with astonishing physical gifts and great personal charisma. Kahanamoku ruled the waves in competitive swimming for more than a decade, taking the sprint gold medal at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, then again in Antwerp in 1920. The following year, along came the teenaged Weissmuller, 12 years younger and intent on smashing every world record that Duke held.

A full-blooded Hawaiian, Kahanamoku faced frequent racist slights. Newspaper coverage often stressed his skin color and sometimes dwelt uncomfortably on physical attributes. Weissmuller, born in a German community in what was then Austria-Hungary and now is Romania, ran with a tough crowd in a hardscrabble Chicago neighborhood until he fell in love with swimming and turned out to be very, very fast.

Kahanamoku ducked Weissmuller for nearly three years, even when the younger man traveled to Honolulu to swim against the Hawaiian in a major meet. Kahanamoku boarded an ocean liner for California as the challenger’s ship was arriving. That set up the Paris Olympiad of 1924 as the ideal venue for the showdown between the aging great and the dazzling up-and-comer.

Both men can claim readers’ sympathies. Both overcame obstacles of birth and both were, well, cooler than we are. A superficially mellow, easygoing sort who played his ukulele and sang Hawaiian tunes between races, Kahanamoku was an assassin once the race began. Between contests at the 1924 Games, the ebullient Weissmuller fractured Parisian crowds by performing a slapstick diving act with another Hawaiian swimmer, Stubby Kruger. It’s hard to dislike a man who specified that, at his funeral, a recording of his trademark Tarzan yodel should be played three times before his body entered the ground for eternity.

Author Todd Balf makes the most of these compelling personalities, employing a throwback breezy style that fits his story. But he has also haunted archives and pursued interviews for the facts that fill out the tale.

Perhaps inevitably, Takaishi’s saga feels like an afterthought. His path to the Paris Games was comparably difficult. Japanese swimmers of his generation had to invent a new swimming style to compete internationally, and Takaishi was half a foot shorter than his two rivals, a significant handicap for a sprint swimmer. But many readers will be impatient to get back to the story of Johnny and the Duke.

How did they all fare in Paris in 1924? You can look it up on your phone, but it will be more fun to read the book.

David O. Stewart has published five books of history and five historical novels. His current project follows the consequential lives of two athletes from the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, U.S. General George S. Patton Jr. and Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel-Baker of Britain.

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