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100 Olympic Tidbits: First Asian Olympiad

The Games went to Asia for the first time when Tokyo hosted the XVIII Olympiad in 1964. Lighting the Olympic flame was Yoshinori Sakai, who was born on the same day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser capped her Olympic career with a gold in the 100m freestyle and a silver in the 4x100 freestyle relay, bringing her total to four golds and four silvers over three Olympiads, while Ethiopia's barefoot runner Abebe Bikila won his second straight Olympic marathon.

A record 44 athletes represented the Philippines, and they didn’t come home empty-handed as featherweight boxer Anthony Villanueva won the country’s first Olympic silver medal, narrowly losing to Stanislav Stepashkin of the Soviet Union, 3-2, in the gold medal match. Villanueva surpassed the achievement of his father Jose, a bronze medalist in the 1932 Games. The ’64 Olympics also marked a milestone for Filipino shooter Martin Gison, who appeared in his fifth and last Games, making his debut in Berlin in 1936 and competing in every Olympiad thereafter except the 1960 edition. (Source: Olympic.org and Olympic.ph)

Editor's Note: To celebrate the 100-day countdown to the London Games, we will be publishing 100 tidbits about the Olympics. Come back to Yahoo! PH Sports, as we publish a new tidbit everyday.