Wilma Rudolf

#70/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

I was already reading about another talented lady when my daughter came home and recounted the story of Wilma Rudolf. They had read the book “Wilma Unlimited” in school and were supposed to do some thought-provoking questions about how she might have inspired them as home-work. I was totally intrigued and immediately started reading about Wilma Rudolf.

Wilma Rudolph was an American sprinter who became a world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon in track and field following her stupendous success in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. She won three gold medals in the 100 and 200 meter individual events and the 4 x 100 meter relay at the said games. Wilma was acclaimed the fastest woman in the world in the 1960s and became the first American woman, to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Due to the worldwide television coverage of the 1960 Summer Olympics, she became an international star along with other Olympic athletes such as Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Oscar Robertson, and Rafer Johnson who also competed in Italy.

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 pounds (2.0 kg) on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee in the US. She was the twentieth of twenty-two siblings from her father's two marriages. Shortly after Wilma’s birth, her family moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, where she grew up and attended elementary and high school. Her father, Ed worked as a railway porter and did odd jobs in Clarksville, while her mother, Blanche, worked as a maid in Clarksville homes.

Wilma was a sickly child and contracted diseases easily. At birth, she wasn’t even expected to survive a year but not only did she survive but she was otherwise a very active child, always found hopping and running around. However, she suffered from several early childhood illnesses, including pneumonia and scarlet fever. For the racially segregated family and community, doctor was a luxury – not only due to looming poverty but also because there was just one doctor in the area who would agree to see black people. Wilma contracted infantile paralysis (caused by the polio virus) at the age of four. She recovered from polio, but lost strength in her left leg and foot and ended up with a twisted leg. Because there was little medical care available to African American residents of Clarksville in the 1940s, her parents sought treatment for her at the historically black Meharry Medical College (now Nashville General Hospital at Meharry) in Nashville, Tennessee, about 50 miles (80 km) from Clarksville where Wilma would go twice a week with her mom in the back seat of a bus. She had to pull out of school too but she did not let herself be contained and would hop around on one foot keeping herself active. Physically disabled for much of her early life, she wore a heavy steel leg brace until she was eight years old. Although the brace allowed her to go back to school, she would have to just sit and watch from the sidelines during sports as she enviously watched her classmates play Basketball. For two years Wilma and her mother made weekly bus trips to Nashville for treatments to regain the use of her weakened leg. She also received subsequent at-home massage treatments four times a day from members of her family and wore an orthopedic shoe for support of her foot for another two years. Because of the treatments she received at Meharry and the daily massages from her family members, she was able to overcome the debilitating effects of polio and learned to walk without a leg brace or orthopedic shoe for support by the time she was twelve years old. One Sunday out of the blue just outside the Church, Wilma decided to take off the brace and walk in. Her knees trembled but she took one step at a time with full concentration as she walked in much to the gasps of everyone around. There was no looking back then and the brace soon was packed and sent off back to the hospital. The next target for her was Basketball which she had by now fallen in love with and which she could now take up.

As already mentioned, Wilma was initially home-schooled due to the frequent illnesses that caused her to miss kindergarten and first grade. She began attending second grade at Cobb Elementary School in Clarksville in 1947, when she was seven years old. Rudolph attended Clarksville's all-black Burt High School, where she excelled in basketball. She led her team to the High School Finals where surprisingly her team lost. As she sat dejected after the game, she was approached by Ed Temple, Tennessee State’s track and field coach, who had come to watch the game to join the track and field team. Temple invited fourteen-year-old Wilma Rudolph to join his summer training program at Tennessee State. After attending the track camp, Wilma won all nine events. She entered at an Amateur Athletic Union track meet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Under Temple’s guidance she continued to train regularly at Tennessee State University (TSU) while still a high school student. Wilma raced at amateur athletic events with TSU’s women’s track team, known as the Tigerbelles, for two more years before enrolling at TSU as a student in 1958. During her senior year of high school Wilma became pregnant with her first child, Yolanda, who was born in 1958, a few weeks prior to her enrollment at TSU in Nashville, for which she had earned a full scholarship thanks to her performance in the track and field team. She was the first member of her family to go to college. In college, Wilma continued to compete in track. She also became a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She graduated from Tennessee State with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1963. Wilma’s college education was paid for through her participation in a work-study scholarship program that required her to work on the TSU campus for two hours a day.

When Wilma was sixteen and a junior in high school, she attended the 1956 U.S. Olympic track and field team trials in Seattle, Washington, and qualified to compete in the 200 meter individual event at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Rudolph, the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic team, was one of five TSU Tigerbelles to qualify for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. She was defeated in a preliminary heat of the 200 meter race at the Melbourne Olympic Games, but ran the third leg of the 4 × 100 meter relay. The American team of Wilma Rudolph, Isabelle Daniels, Mae Faggs, and Margaret Matthews, all of whom were TSU Tigerbelles, won the bronze medal, matching the world-record time of 44.9 seconds. But the British and the Australian Teams were faster and won the silver and the gold respectively. In 1959, at the Pan American Games in Chicago, Illinois, Wilma won a silver medal in the 100 meter individual event, as well as a gold medal in the 4 × 100 meter relay with teammates Isabelle Daniels, Barbara Jones, and Lucinda Williams. In addition, Rudolph won the AAU 100 meter title in 1959 and defended it for four consecutive years. During her career, Rudolph also won three AAU indoor titles.

While she was still a sophomore at Tennessee State, Wilma competed in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, where she set a world record in the 200 meter dash that stood for eight years. She also qualified for the 1960 Summer Olympics in the 100 meter dash. At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy, she competed in three events on a cinder track in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico: the 100 and 200 meter sprints, as well as the 4 × 100 meter relay. Wilma, who won a gold medal in each of these events, became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympiad. Wilma Rudolph was one of the most popular athletes of the 1960 Rome Olympics and emerged from the Olympic Games as “The Tornado, the fastest woman on earth.” The Italians nicknamed her “La Gazzella Nera” (“The Black Gazelle”) and the French called her “La Perle Noire” (“The Black Pearl”). Along with other 1960 Olympic athletes such as Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Oscar Robertson, and Rafer Johnson, Wilma became an international star due to the first worldwide television coverage of the Olympics that year. The 1960 Rome Olympics launched she into the public spotlight and the media cast her as America’s athletic “leading lady” and a “queen”, with praises of her athletic accomplishments as well as her feminine beauty and poise. Following her Olympic victories the United States Information Agency made a ten-minute documentary film, Wilma Rudolph: Olympic Champion (1961), to highlight her accomplishments on the track. Wilma’s appearance in 1960 on “To Tell the Truth”, an American television game show, and later as a guest on “The Ed Sullivan Show” also helped promote her status as an iconic sports star.

In 1961, Wilma married William Ward, a North Carolina College at Durham track team member; they divorced in 1963. In the interim, she retired from track competition at the age of twenty-two, following victories in the 100 meter and 4 x 100 meter relay races at a U.S. - Soviet meet at Stanford University in 1962. At the time of her retirement, she was still the world record-holder in the 100 meter (11.2 seconds set on July 19, 1961), 200 meter (22.9 seconds set on July 9, 1960), and 4 x 100 meter relay events. She had also won seven national AAU sprint titles and set the women’s indoor track record of 6.9 seconds in the 60-yard dash. As Rudolph explained it, she retired at the peak of her athletic career because she wanted to leave the sport while still at her best. As such, she did not compete at the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan,[15][30] saying, “If I won two gold medals, there would be something lacking. I’ll stick with the glory I’ve already won like Jesse Owens did in 1936.” After retiring from competition, Wilma continued her education at Tennessee State and earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 1963. That year she also made a month-long trip to West Africa as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S State Department. She served as U.S. representative to the 1963 Friendship Games in Dakar, Senegal, and visited Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Upper Volta, where she attended sporting events, visited schools, and made guest appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She also attended the premier of the U.S. Information Agency’s documentary film that highlighted her track career.

Wilma Rudolph, who did not earn significant money as an amateur athlete, shifted to a career in teaching and coaching after her retirement from track competition. She began as a second-grade teacher at Cobb Elementary School, where she had attended as a child, and coached track at Burt High School, where she had once been a student-athlete herself, but conflict forced her to leave the position. Wilma moved several times over the years and lived in various places such as Chicago, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; Saint Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Tennessee; California; and Maine. In May 1963, a few weeks after returning from Africa, Wilma participated in a civil rights protest in her hometown of Clarksville in an effort to desegregate one of the city's restaurants. Within a short time the mayor announced that the city’s public facilities, including its restaurants, would become fully integrated. She also married Robert Eldridge, who had fathered her child when she was in high school, later that year. The couple had three additional children, but divorced after seventeen years of marriage.

Wilma's autobiography, Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph, was published in 1977. It served as the basis for several other publications and films. By 2014, at least twenty-one books on her life had been published for children from pre-school youth to high school students. In addition to teaching, Wilma worked for nonprofit organizations and government-sponsored projects that supported athletic development among American children. In Boston, Massachusetts, she became involved in the federal Job Corps program, and in 1967 served as a track specialist for Operation Champion. In 1981, Wilma established and led the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana, that trains youth athletes. In 1987, she joined DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as director of its women's track program and served as a consultant on minority affairs to the university's president. The single mother of four children hosted a local television show in Indianapolis. She was also a television sports commentator for ABC Sports during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, and lit the cauldron to open the Pan American Games in Indianapolis in 1987 in front of 80,000 spectators at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In 1992, two years before her untimely death, Wilma became a vice president at Nashville's Baptist Hospital. In July 1994 (shortly after her mother's death), Wilma was diagnosed with brain cancer. She also had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Her condition deteriorated rapidly, and she died on November 12, 1994, at the age of fifty-four, at her home in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. Across Tennessee, the state flag flew at half-mast on the day of her memorial-service.

Wilma was named United Press International Athlete of the Year (1960) and Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year (1960 and 1961). She was also the recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award (1960) for the top amateur athlete in the United States and the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Award (1962). In addition, she had a private meeting with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. She was also honored with the National Sports Award (1993) and was inducted into several women’s and sports halls of fame along with many other awards. Several other recognitions like naming of roads and tracks in her name, highlighted her glorious innings as an athlete par excellence. In 1996, the Women’s Sports Foundation presented its first Wilma Rudolph Courage Award to Jackie Joyner-Kersee. The annual award is presented to a female athlete who exhibits extraordinary courage in her athletic performance, demonstrates the ability to overcome adversity, makes significant contributions to sports, and serves as an inspiration and role model to those who face challenges, overcomes them, and strives for success at all levels.

As an Olympic champion in the early 1960s, Wilma was among the most highly visible black women in America and abroad. She became a role model for black and female athletes and her Olympic successes helped elevate women's track and field in the United States. In addition to her own athletic accomplishments, Wilma Rudolph is remembered for her contributions to youth, including founding and heading the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, which trains youth athletes. She has been memorialized with a variety of tributes, including her image on a commemorative U.S. postage stamp, the fifth in its “Distinguished Americans” series. “Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph” (1977), her autobiography, was adapted into a television docudrama. Her life is also remembered in “Unlimited” (2015), a short documentary film for school audiences, as well as in numerous publications, especially books for young readers. 

Source: Wikipedia, Google and “Wilma Unlimited” by Kathleen Krull