Holger Louis Nielsen (18 December 1866 in Copenhagen – 26 January 1955 in Hellerup) was a Danish fencing, shooting sports, and athlete.
Fencing
Nielsen's main sport was fencing, in which he competed in the
sabre. At Athens, Nielsen placed third in the sabre event. He split his matches in the five-man, round-robin tournament. Nielsen defeated
Adolf Schmal and Georgios Iatridis, but lost to Telemachos Karakalos and Ioannis Georgiadis. This 2–2 record put Nielsen in third place.
Firearms competitions
In the military rifle event, Nielsen quit the competition after the first day. He had shot 20 times out of the full 40, though his score was unknown.
Nielsen placed fifth in the military pistol event.
He won a bronze medal in the rapid fire pistol, coming in last of the three shooters that finished the competition.
His best result of the Games was a surprise
silver medal in the free pistol competition; his score of 285 was far behind
Sumner Paine's 442 but was sufficient to defeat the other three shooters in the event. His scores for each of the five strings of 6 shots were 12, 85, 62, 24, and 100.
Discus
Nielsen also competed in the
discus throw. He did not place among the top four in the event, though records are unclear as to which place between fifth and last (ninth) he received.
Football
Together with fellow Københavns Roklub athlete
Eugen Schmidt, Nielsen also participated in the unofficial football event in which a Danish XI faced a Greek team as a "demonstration sport", and it was the Danes who came-out as the winners by either 9–0 or 15–0.
Other activities
Nielsen is also credited with developing an early set of rules for
handball in 1898,
and with developing a form of external cardiopulmonary resuscitation called the Holger Nielsen method in 1932. The National Research Council gave support to this method in 1951, however, it was superseded by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in recommendations of 1958. (Artificial Respiration, the history of an idea. A B Baker Med Hist. 1971 15(4): 336-351)
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