Wilma Rudolph

When Wilma Rudolph was born in Tennessee in 1940, nobody would have bet on her becoming an athlete. She arrived early, weighing barely two kilograms, the twentieth of her father's twenty-two children, in a family with very little money. As a small child she suffered from one illness after another, and then came the most serious of them all: polio, which badly weakened her left leg. For years, it seemed unlikely that she would ever walk normally.

Her mother refused to accept that. Once a week for two years, she and Wilma travelled by bus to Meharry Medical College, a Black medical school in Nashville about fifty miles away. At the time, segregation kept Black patients out of many hospitals in the South. At home, her brothers and sisters learned to massage the damaged leg, taking turns every day. Wilma was fitted with a metal brace, which she wore for years and secretly hated. She later admitted to taking it off whenever her parents weren't looking, determined to walk without it.

By her early teens, the brace was gone, and Wilma was playing basketball with such speed that her high school coach nicknamed her "Skeeter", a slang word for a mosquito. It was on the basketball court that Ed Temple, the track coach at Tennessee State University, first noticed her, and he invited her to train with his team in the summer. In 1956, aged only sixteen, she ran in the relay at the Olympic Games in Melbourne and came home with a bronze medal.

Four years later, in Rome, she became a star. She won the 100 metres by a clear margin, in a time that would have been a world record had the wind behind her not been slightly too strong. She then won the 200 metres, and in the 4 x 100 metres relay, despite almost dropping the baton at the last change, she overtook the German runner to bring the United States home first. No American woman had ever won three gold medals in track and field at a single Olympic Games. The Italian press called her "the Black Gazelle".

When she came home, the governor of Tennessee planned a welcome celebration for her in Clarksville, the town where she had grown up. Like almost everything else there, it was going to be segregated, with Black and white citizens kept apart. Wilma refused to attend unless everyone could celebrate together. The organisers gave in, and on 4 October 1960, thousands of people lined the streets for her parade, which was followed by a banquet for more than a thousand guests. It was the first integrated event in the history of Clarksville.