Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph was born June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee, a premature baby weighing four and a half pounds, the twentieth of her father's twenty-two children across two marriages. She survived scarlet fever and pneumonia as a small child, then contracted polio at age five, which left her left leg weakened and twisted. Her mother drove her ninety miles round trip each week to the historically Black Meharry Medical College in Nashville for treatment, and the family massaged the leg by hand four times a day between visits. She wore a metal leg brace until she was nine and a corrective shoe for years after that, and did not walk unassisted until around age twelve, when the brace finally came off for good.

Rudolph made the U.S. Olympic team at sixteen and won bronze in the 4x100 relay at the 1956 Melbourne Games. At the 1960 Rome Olympics she won three gold medals, in the 100 meters, the 200 meters, and the 4x100 relay, becoming the first American woman to take three golds in a single Olympiad, and set a world record in the relay's semifinal round along the way. She returned home to segregated Clarksville, Tennessee, and refused to attend her own welcome-home celebration until organizers agreed to integrate it, one of the first fully integrated municipal events in the city's history. She retired from competition in 1962 at twenty-two, finished her education degree at Tennessee State the next year, and spent the following decades teaching elementary school, coaching, and running her own athletic foundation for children.

The Olympic triumph did not translate into lasting financial security. Rudolph earned nothing from her three gold medals under the era's strict amateur rules, turned down endorsement offers rather than lose her eligibility before Rome, and spent much of her post-competitive life in ordinary teaching and coaching jobs while white contemporaries with far smaller Olympic records built commercial careers off theirs. Her marriage to her high school boyfriend Robert Eldridge, with whom she had four children, ended in divorce in 1980 after seventeen years. She had also given birth to a first daughter, Yolanda, in 1958, before she had finished college and before her Olympic fame, a fact her public image as a triumphant amateur heroine rarely made room for.

Rudolph was diagnosed with brain and throat cancer in the summer of 1994 and died that November 12, at 54, at her home in Brentwood, Tennessee. Clarksville renamed a boulevard for her the year she died and later built a statue and an indoor track in her name at Tennessee State; the U.S. Postal Service issued a Wilma Rudolph stamp in 2004. Track and field historians now treat her as the athlete who made an Olympic sprint final a stage for a Black woman for the first time in American television, a distinction her own foundation kept working at directly, training young athletes in Indianapolis until her death interrupted it.

Wilma Rudolph's life against the full span of the corpus.

• 1960 Rome Olympics — 100 meters gold other
  Won in 11.0 seconds 1960
• 1960 Rome Olympics — 200 meters gold other
  Set an Olympic record of 23.2 seconds in the opening heat 1960
• 1960 Rome Olympics — 4x100 relay gold other
  Anchor leg; set a world record of 44.4 seconds in the semifinal 1960
• Wilma Rudolph Foundation company
  Founded in Indianapolis to train young athletes 1981

• June 23, 1940 aged 0 Born in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee
• 1945 aged ~5 Contracts polio at age five
• 1956 aged ~16 Wins bronze in the 4x100 relay at the Melbourne Olympics, age sixteen
• 1958 aged ~18 Gives birth to her first daughter, Yolanda
• September 1960 aged 20 Wins three gold medals at the Rome Olympics
• 1962 aged ~22 Retires from competition
• 1981 aged ~41 Founds the Wilma Rudolph Foundation
• November 12, 1994 aged 54 Dies of cancer in Brentwood, Tennessee

• Jesse Owens 1913–1980
  Track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defying Nazi ideology. predecessor in Olympic sprinting
• Jackie Robinson 1919–1972
  First African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking the color barrier. contemporary in breaking sport's color line
• Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
  Boxing legend and cultural icon known for his athletic brilliance and principled stance against the Vietnam War draft. romantically linked in the early 1960s
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. met privately with