With the Beijing Olympics in full swing, the seaside village of Port Hood in Nova Scotia is remembering one of its own greats.

Duncan Gillis was Canada's first flagbearer in the 1912 Olympics. Although he spent most of his athletic career in British Columbia, his remaining relatives in Port Hood still gush with pride.

"Whenever the Olympics come around, we always mention it. It's a pretty amazing thing," Gillis's niece Annie Mae MacEachen told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Port Hood.

MacEachen still has black and white photographs that show her uncle standing behind at least a dozen shining trophies.

One of her most prized possessions is a gold medal that her uncle won in the hammer throw event in 1908.

"I wouldn't part with that," she said. "We're very proud of him. We were always very proud of him."

Her sister, Cassie MacDonald, has the silver medal her uncle won in the 1912 Olympics at the age of 30, and an old teapot.

"(It's) one of the first trophies uncle Duncan won as an athlete," she told CTV Atlantic holding up the intricately decorated pot. "We are not quite sure what he won (it) for. It's been a treasure in my parent's home and my aunt's home, and now I have it."

According to local museum curator Joanne Watts, Gillis was born in Port Hood in 1881.

"I think he may have had to fudge his age at some point in time because we came across so many dates, but we went with what was in the parish records," Watts told CTV.ca in a phone interview from Port Hood.

Watts said Gillis left for British Columbia in 1904 at the age of 23 and joined the Vancouver Police Department. In his spare time, he worked hard as a record-setting athlete.

Chestico Museum in Port Hood is home to a 16-pound weight used in a 1908 Olympic hammer throw, just like the one Gillis used to win the silver medal in Sweden four years later.

"Duncan Gillis probably doesn't get his due," Watts told CTV Atlantic. "At the time he was considered one of the greatest athletes of his day."

"Before the 1912 Olympics, the New York Times did a profile on athletes to watch at the Stockholm Olympics. The only Canadian mentioned was Duncan Gillis, and that is why he carried the flag."

After the Olympics, Gillis took up wrestling and became the amateur heavyweight champion of Canada in 1913.

Gillis was inducted into the British Columbia Sport Hall of Fame in 1967. The Chestico Museum sponsored his induction into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame in 1999.

"We're just a small community and when someone from here does well we just latch onto it," Watts said.

Duncan Gillis died in Vancouver in May of 1963, at the age of 81.