Rudolph, Wilma Glodean

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RUDOLPH, Wilma Glodean

(b. 23 June 1940 in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee; d. 12 November 1994 in Brentwood, Tennessee), world-class runner and the first woman from the United States to win three gold medals in one Olympiad.

Rudolph was the sixth of eight children of Eddie B. Rudolph, a railroad porter and handyman, and Blanche Pettus. Her father also had children from a previous marriage, although sources differ as to the exact number. At birth Rudolph weighed only four and a half pounds, and during her early childhood she contracted scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and polio. As a result, she was crippled and could walk only with a leg brace. For four years Rudolph's mother, who worked as a domestic, accompanied her daughter twice weekly on the 100-mile round-trip bus ride to Meharry Medical College in Nashville for treatments. During the rest of the week Rudolph's siblings massaged her leg and reported to their mother when Rudolph removed her brace, which she frequently did.

Rudolph was determined to be like other children. At age nine she decided that it was time to walk without the brace, so she unstrapped it and walked right down the center aisle of her church. She continued to wear the brace occasionally until age eleven, but by age twelve she was shooting hoops in the driveway with her brothers and sisters. Her goal was to make the school basketball team; by the seventh grade she did just that. Rudolph saw no action for three years, but she stuck with it. During that time her coach, Clinton Gray, started a girl's track team mostly to keep the girls in shape during the off-season. Rudolph joined the team and surprised everyone by winning every race she entered. But her first love was still basketball; she warmed the bench for one more year, giving her all during practices and pestering her coach about when she could start. Coach Gray nicknamed her "Skeeter," because she was skinny, had long limbs, and was constantly in motion. Finally, in her sophomore year at Burt High School, she made starting guard. By then she stood five feet, eleven inches, and weighed just over 100 pounds. She scored 32 points during one game that season and helped her team to a conference title.

During the state championship basketball tournament, Rudolph was spotted by Ed Temple, the women's track coach for the Tigerbells of Tennessee State University. Temple invited her to a running camp that summer in Nashville, during which he took the girls to an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) meet in Philadelphia. He entered Rudolph in the 75-meter and 100-meter dashes and the 440-meter relay. She competed in nine races, including preliminary heats, and won them all. Through the following winter, she continued to work with Temple and on her own. (It was widely known and largely overlooked that she cut classes to practice.) One year later, in 1956, at the age of sixteen and just five years out of her leg brace, Rudolph went to the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, and won a bronze medal in the women's relay.

The following year, her senior year of high school, Rudolph became pregnant and was unable to run that season. In September, Rudolph enrolled at Tennessee State University and set her sights on the Olympics. At the Nationals in July 1960, before the Rome Olympics, Rudolph set a woman's world record of 22.9 seconds in the 200-meter dash. The record stood for nearly eight years. Rudolph qualified for three Olympic events: the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay. She headed off to Rome with her old friend and mentor Ed Temple as coach. In Rome, Rudolph won the 100-meter dash by a 3-yard margin in 11.0 seconds. She then set an Olympic record of 23.2 seconds in the opening heat of the 200-meter dash and ran the final in 24.0 seconds to win another gold medal. Rudolph also anchored the relay team—all women from Tennessee State—and ran her leg in 44.5 seconds to win a third gold medal, becoming the first U.S. woman to win three Olympic gold medals. (She also had set a world record of 44.4 seconds in the semifinals.) She was the only track-and-field athlete to win three gold medals at that Olympiad. Before returning home, Rudolph went to the British Empire Games in London and then to an invitational meet in Stuttgart featuring Olympic winners. She won every race she entered.

Clarksville, the town where Rudolph was raised, celebrated her homecoming with a victory parade and banquet, the first racially integrated event in the town's history. Rudolph went on a victory tour that covered nearly every state in the union. In 1960 she was named United Press Athlete of the Year and Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year. She was honored again by the Associated Press in 1961. In 1961 Rudolph married William Ward, a fellow runner; they divorced in 1962. At that time Rudolph was starting to think about retiring. In 1962 she competed in a dual meet with the Soviet Union at Stanford University. As she sat on the bench, untying her shoes after winning the 100-meter dash and the relay, a young boy came up and asked for her autograph. She signed both shoes and handed them to him. Wanting to go out at the top of her game—"in style"—Rudolph had finished running.

In July 1963 Rudolph married Robert Eldridge, her high school sweetheart and the father of her first child; they had four children and were divorced in 1981. Also in 1963, Rudolph graduated from Tennessee State with a B.A. in elementary education and began teaching at Clarksville's Cobb Elementary School and coaching track at Burt High School. But she was restless. She accepted a job as director of a community center in Evansville, Indiana, and then worked for the Job Corps in Poland Spring, Maine, then in St. Louis, and at Pelham Junior High School in Detroit. In 1967 Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey invited her to work as a member of Operation Champion, a program that made professional training available to star athletes from the ghettos. After that, she worked for the Watts Community Action Committee in Los Angeles, California, and in Chicago for Mayor Richard Daley's Youth Foundation. Rudolph also founded her own foundation (the Wilma Rudoph Foundation), a not-for-profit, community-based amateur sports program that offered free coaching and academic assistance and support for underprivileged children. Wilma's advice to the youngsters was "[H]ave confidence in yourself. Triumph can't be had without a struggle."

In her later years Rudolph worked as a model, television commentator, talk show host, track coach at DePauw University, goodwill ambassador to French West Africa, lecturer, sports commentator, and the cohost of a network radio show. Nothing seemed to stick. She suffered from depression and was often in debt. She finally returned to Clarksville to be with her family. Rudolph died of a brain tumor at the age of fifty-four; she is buried at Edgefield Missionary Baptist Church in Clarksville.

Rudolph grew up with a disability in extreme poverty in a racially oppressive environment. However, she overcame all these obstacles to become the fastest woman runner in the world and an inspiration to many. After she broke two world records and won three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics, teammate Bill Mulliken said of Randolph, "She was beautiful, she was nice, and she was the best."

Rudolph's autobiography, Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph (1977), provides a very personal narrative on the early years of her life. There are three biographies: Tom Biracree, Wilma Rudolph (1988), Wayne Coffey, Wilma Rudolph (1993), and Victoria Sherrow,Wilma Rudolph (1995). For additional details on Rudolph's awards and accomplishments, see Grace and Glory: A Century of Women in the Olympics (1996), edited by Siobhan Drummond and Elizabeth Rathburn. There are several articles available at websites, including M. B. Roberts, "Rudolph Ran and the World Went Wild," and Larry Schwartz, "Her Roman Conquest," both at http://espn.go.com. An obituary is in the Washington Post (13 Nov. 1994).

Katharine F. Brittonm