Wilma Rudolph Bio
Wilma Rudolph full names Wilma Glodean Rudolph was an African-American sprinter born in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee, who became a world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon in track and field following her successes in the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games.
Rudolph competed in the 200 m dash and won a bronze medal in the 4 × 100 m relays at the 1956 Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.
She also won three gold medals, in the 100 and 200 m individual events and the 4 x 100 m relay at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy. Rudolph 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, Rudolph became an international star along with other Olympic athletes such as Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Oscar Robertson, and Rafer Johnson who competed in Italy.
As an Olympic champion in the early 1960s, Rudolph 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. Rudolph is also regarded as a civil rights and women’s rights pioneer.
Wilma Rudolph Age
Wilma was born on June 23, 1940, and died on November 12, 1994. She died at the age of 54 years old.
Wilma Rudolph Family/Parents
Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 pounds (2.0 kg) on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee. 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, who worked as a railway porter and did odd jobs in Clarksville, died in 1961; her mother, Blanche, worked as a maid in Clarksville homes and died in 1994.
Wilma Rudolph Childhood/Education
Rudolph suffered from several early childhood illnesses, including pneumonia and scarlet fever, and contracted infantile paralysis (caused by the poliovirus) at the age of five. She recovered from polio but lost strength in her left leg and foot.
Physically disabled for much of her early life, Rudolph wore a leg brace until she was twelve years old. Because there was little medical care available to African American residents of Clarksville in the 1940s, Rudolph’s parents sought treatment for her at the historically black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, about 50 miles (80 km) from Clarksville.
For two years, Rudolph 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 messages from her family members, Rudolph 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.
Rudolph was initially homeschooled 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 and track.
During her senior year of high school, Rudolph became pregnant with her first child, Yolanda, who was born in 1958, a few weeks prior to her enrollment at Tennessee State University in Nashville.
In college, Rudolph continued to compete in track. She also became a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Rudolph graduated from Tennessee State with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1963.
Rudolph’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.
Wilma Rudolph Husband/Divorce
Rudolph was married twice, with both marriages ending in divorce. On October 14, 1961, she married William “Willie” Ward, a member of the North Carolina College at Durham track team. They divorced in May 1963.
After her graduation from Tennessee State in 1963, Rudolph married Robert Eldridge, her high school sweetheart, with whom she already had a daughter, Yolanda, born in 1958.
Rudolph and Eldridge had four children: two daughters (Yolanda, born in 1958, and Djuanna, born in 1964) and two sons (Robert Jr., born in 1965, and Xurry, born in 1971). The seventeen-year marriage ended in divorce.
Wilma Rudolph Death/Cause of Death
In July 1994 (shortly after her mother’s death), Rudolph 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 54, at her home in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee.
Rudolph’s funeral service was held at Edgefield Missionary Baptist Church in Clarksville, Tennessee. She was survived by her four children, eight grandchildren, and many siblings, nieces, and nephews. Thousands of mourners filled Tennessee State University’s Kean Hall on November 17, 1994, for the memorial service in her honor. Across Tennessee, the state flag flew at half-mast.
Rudolph’s legacy lies in her efforts to overcome obstacles that included childhood illnesses and physical disability to become the fastest woman runner in the world in 1960. At the 1960 Rome Olympics, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympiad.
Rudolph was one of the first role models for black and female athletes. Her Olympic success “gave a tremendous boost to women’s track in the United States.” Rudolph’s celebrity also caused gender barriers to be broken at previously all-male track and field events such as the Millrose Games.
Wilma Rudolph Career
Rudolph was first introduced to organized sports at Burt High School, the center of Clarksville’s African American community. After completing several years of medical treatments to regain the use of her left leg, Rudolph chose to follow in her sister Yolanda’s footsteps and began playing basketball in the eighth grade.
Rudolph continued to play basketball in high school, where she became a starter on the team and began competing in track. In her sophomore year, Rudolph scored 803 points and set a new record for high school girls’ basketball. Rudolph’s high school coach, C. C. Gray, gave her the nickname of “Skeeter” (for mosquito) because she moved so fast.
While playing for her high school basketball team, Rudolph was spotted by Ed Temple, Tennessee State’s track and field coach, a major break for the active young athlete. The day that Temple saw the tenth grader for the first time, he knew she was a natural athlete.
Rudolph had already gained some track experience on Burt High School’s track team two years earlier, mostly as a way to keep busy between basketball seasons. As a high school sophomore, Rudolph competed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute in her first major track event. Although she lost the race, Rudolph was determined to continue competing and win.
Temple invited fourteen-year-old Rudolph to join his summer training program at Tennessee State. After attending the track camp, Rudolph 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 TSU while still a high school student. Rudolph 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.
1956 Summer Olympics
When Rudolph 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.
Rudolph 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 m relay. The American team of 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. The British team won the silver medal.
The Australian team, with the 100- and 200-meter gold medalist Betty Cuthbert as their anchor leg, won the gold medal in a time of 44.5 seconds. After Rudolph returned to her Tennessee home from the Melbourne Olympic Games, she showed her high school classmates the bronze medal that she had won and decided to try to win a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy.
In 1958 Rudolph enrolled at Tennessee State, where Temple continued as her track coach. In 1959, at the Pan American Games in Chicago, Illinois, Rudolph won a silver medal in the 100-meter individual event, as well as a gold medal in the 4 × 100 m relays 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.
1960 Summer Olympics
While she was still a sophomore at Tennessee State, Rudolph 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 m 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, Rudolph competed in three events on a cinder track in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico: the 100- and 200 m sprints, as well as the 4 × 100 m relays. Rudolph, who won a gold medal in each of these events, became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympiad.
Rudolph ran the finals in the 100-meter dash in a wind-aided time of 11.0 seconds. (The record-setting time was not credited as a world record, because the wind, at 2.75 m (3.01 yd) per second, exceeded the maximum of 2 m (2.2 yds).) Rudolph became the first American woman to win a gold medal in the 100-meter race since Helen Stephens’s win in the 1936 Summer Olympics.
Rudolph won another gold medal in the finals of the 200-meter dash with a time of 24.0 seconds, after setting a new Olympic record of 23.2 seconds in the opening heat. After these wins, she was hailed throughout the world as “the fastest woman in history.”
Wilma Rudolph Foundation
She overcame her disabilities to compete in the 1956 Summer Olympic Games, and in 1960, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field at a single Olympics. Later in life, she formed the Wilma Rudolph Foundation to promote amateur athletics.
Wilma Rudolph Quotes
1. The triumph can’t be had without the struggle.
2. I loved the feeling of freedom in running, the fresh air, the feeling that the only person I’m competing with is me.
3. No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you.
4. Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.
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