The Sport Australia Hall of Fame is mourning the passing of Eric Pearce, the first Australian hockey player to compete at four Olympic Games, who died recently aged 94. Pearce was inducted in 1985 as the only hockey player among the inaugural class.
Eric built his reputation as one of the most dangerous strikers Australian hockey has produced, playing centre-forward with a combination of toughness, technique and an instinct for finding the goal. He wore the green and gold across four consecutive Games — Melbourne 1956, Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964 and Mexico City 1968 — the first Australian in the sport’s history to do so.
Those four campaigns bookended two of the most significant moments in Australian hockey. At Tokyo 1964, Eric was part of the side that claimed the country’s first-ever Olympic hockey medal, a bronze, and four years later in Mexico City he helped Australia go one better with silver, an achievement recognised when he was chosen to carry the flag at the closing ceremony.
His scoring record at those Games has rarely been matched. In 1964 he found the net twice as Australia beat Pakistan for the first time in the sides’ history, and at Rome 1960 he single-handedly accounted for every goal in an 8–1 demolition of Japan — a tally that still stands among the most prolific individual displays in Olympic hockey.
Hockey ran through the Pearce family. Eric was one of five brothers — Cec, Mel, Gordon and Julian among them — who all represented Australia, and remarkably he had a brother alongside him at every one of his four Olympics. After the family relocated to Western Australia in the late 1940s, the brothers became central to building the sport in the state; Eric spent 19 years as WA’s leading strike forward, played 12 Australian Senior Championships and was part of seven national title wins for the state.
His legacy carried through to the next generation, with daughter Colleen Pearce also representing Australia in hockey, winning bronze at the 1983 World Cup and competing at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics.
Eric was later inducted into the Western Australian Hall of Champions and the Hockey Australia Hall of Fame in 2008. On behalf of the Sport Australia Hall of Fame, we extend our deepest condolences to Eric’s family, friends, former teammates and all those touched by his contribution to the sport. He leaves behind a lasting legacy as an Olympic pioneer, a Hall of Fame member and one of Australian hockey’s true legends.
