His name was Vane Ivanović, and his contributions are remembered by different people for different reasons.

Sports buffs seriously into Olympic history will remember him as a member of the Yugoslav track team at the 1936 Summer Olympics, the first games to be broadcast on television, and the first time that competition in basketball, canoeing and field handball was offered. It was also the Olympics attended by Adolf Hitler, and among the athletes who refused to give Hitler the Nazi salute was Ivanović.  He was the undisputed Yugoslav champion in his disciplines throughout the 1930s, and he held the Yugoslav record in 400m hurdles for 17 years. He was still running in his 80s, but by then had added scuba diving and spearfishing to his portfolio of activities. 

Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian historians note him as a man who devoted most of his life to the idea of Yugoslav unity, and an advocate of democracy as the alternative to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Ivanović was one of the founders of the European Movement who would go on to become the Consul General of Monaco in London, but mostly he saw himself as a democratic Yugoslav-in-exile. He founded the charitable Association of Free Citizens of Yugoslavia designed to help other Yugoslav emigres whom he helped until his death in the late 90s.

As if he was active enough, Ivanović was also shipping magnate who used his wealth and connections on behalf of the Allied Forces during WWII.  After the invasion of Yugoslavia by Germany, Italy, and their allies, Ivanović organized other Yugoslav shipowners into the “Yugoslav Shipping Committee” to help prevent the capture of the Yugoslav mercantile fleet, still in neutral waters, by the Nazis.

By now, you know that we’ve saved for last the part of Ivanović biography that has to do with dogs. This accomplished man was the proud owner of two Dalmatians. A member of the British Dalmatian Club, Ivanović took a pair of Dalmatians to Dalmatia as a gift for his stepfather, Bozo Banac, who had often expressed his interest in introducing the breed there. The irony is that many people maintain that the breed originated in Dalmatia, but important cynologists believe this is unsubstantiated, and to those people, the breed didn’t arrive in Dalmatia until Vane Ivanović took it there.

A number of dog writers, Dr. John H. and Monica Brooks, Dr. David Hancock, and Patches Silverstone among them, discounted Dalmatia as the country of origin because they didn’t find any evidence of it.  In their book, ‘Dalmatians In Canada, the Brooks wrote, “Frankling quotes interesting correspondence in the Sunday Times.  ‘My stepfather … introduced Dalmatian dogs from England in 1930.  There was no trace of Dalmatians in Dalmatia before them … Mr. Vane Ivanović, May 1953.” This is the same  Vane Ivanović.

More on this can be found in Alison Merritt’s article, Considerations of the Origin of the Dalmatian Breed.