Roland Nilsson (shot putter)

Fritz Roland Nilsson (November 26, 1924 – February 21, 2014) was an athlete who was a member of the Swedish Olympic teams in 1948 and 1952. He was also a member of the Michigan Wolverines men's track and field team. He won six Big Ten Conference championships in the shot put and five event championships at the Penn Relays.
Biography.
Nilsson was born in 1924 on the island of Svanö in the Ångerman River in northern Sweden. His father was a factory worker. He graduated from the Sundsvall trade school in 1944 and worked as a civilian mechanic and for the Swedish Air Force.
Nilsson was 6 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 230 pounds. The track coach at the Sundsvall trade school, John Nyman, had won a silver medal for Sweden in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Nyman later recalled that Nyman taught him how to run, jump and throw the discus. Nilsson competed for Sweden in the 1948 Summer Olympics but did not make the finals.
Nilsson left Sweden in November 1949 and moved to Detroit, Michigan where two of his siblings had immigrated in 1923. In the spring of 1950, a neighbor introduced Nilsson to the University of Michigan's track coach, Don Canham. Canham invited Nilsson to come to Ann Arbor and meet Michigan's world-record holder in the shot put, Charlie Fonville. On his visit to Ann Arbor, Canham asked Nilsson to throw the discus, and Nilsson threw it 166 feet—more than three feet better than Michigan's varsity record.
Canham invited Nilsson to attend the university and compete on Michigan's track team. Nilsson worked with Fonville through the summer of 1950 while taking English classes to improve his language skills. After enrolling at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1950, Nilsson became the subject of extensive newspaper coverage. The Associated Press ran a feature story on him in January 1951 in which Fonville described Nilsson's talent with the discus: "He can drop it farther than I can throw it."
Nilsson became a track and field star at the University of Michigan. In six Big Ten indoor and outdoor championships from 1952 to 1954, Nilsson won the shot put competition all six times. Only one other Michigan track athlete, "Big Bill" Watson, has won six Big Ten track and field championships.
Nilsson also excelled in competition at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. In his three years competing in the Penn Relays, Nilsson won five event championships, three in the shot put and two in the discus. He also set a Penn Relays record in the discus with a throw of 174 feet, 3-7/8 inches in 1955. Nilsson was listed on the Penn Relays Wall of Fame in 2009.
At the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Nilsson finished fourth in the shot put and seventh in the discus throw.
In 2006, Nilsson was one of the inaugural inductees into the University of Michigan Track & Field Hall of Fame.
He died in 2014 at the age of 89.