“Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion. The potential for greatness lives within each of us.”                                                        Wilma Rudolph

 September 7, 1960, Olympic Stadium –Rome, Italy: Wilma Rudolph stood on the medal stand with her arms raised and tears running down her cheeks. It was a moment she could never have imagined. She had become the darling of the Rome Olympics and a worldwide track and field sensation. The crowd of 50,000, inspired by her story, thundered “Wilma, Wilma, Wilma.”

Her fairy tale story began two decades earlier in Clarksville, Tennessee. Born pre-maturely, the 20^th of 22 children of Ed Rudolph, his second marriage, and his wife Blanche, Wilma weighed four pounds at birth. She was a sickly child who almost died from scarlet fever, then survived pneumonia, before contracting a severe case of polio at age five. The doctor told Blanche that Wilma would probably never walk again, but she refused to accept his diagnosis.

No white doctors in Clarksville were willing to treat Wilma. Blanche eventually found doctors 50 miles away in Nashville at Meharry Hospital, part of the Black medical school at Fisk University. Once a week, she took off from her job as a maid and rode with Wilma in the backseat of a Greyhound bus so Wilma could receive physical therapy on her legs. At 7, Wilma was fitted with a bulky below-the-knee brace on her left leg to help straighten her severely twisted foot.

Doctors prescribed massage therapy four times a day for Wilma to improve her mobility, so Blanche trained Wilma’s brothers and sisters to do the treatments. She also recruited the siblings as lookouts to make sure Wilma kept the cumbersome brace on while playing outside. It took four years of therapy before the brace was replaced with high-top orthopedic shoes when Wilma was 9. The shoes finally came off at 11 and she made up for lost time.  

Wilma was soon the fastest kid in her neighborhood and went on to become an outstanding basketball player at Burt High School, setting the state record with 49 points scored in a single game. It was on the basketball court that Ed Temple, a sociology professor and women’s track coach at cross-town Tennessee State University, spotted her. He was so impressed with Wilma’s speed that he invited the 15-year-old to join his Tigerbelles track team for summer workouts. He likened the style of the 5’11”, 120-pound speedster to that of a gazelle.

With Temple’s encouragement, support, and expertise, Burt High School started a track team. In their first season, the tall, lanky sophomore easily won all twenty of the events she entered at distances from 50 to 200 meters.

In July 1956, Coach Temple took five Tennessee State runners and Burt High’s 16-year-old running phenom to Seattle to compete in the Olympic Trials. Wilma qualified for the U.S. team in the 200-meter and 400-meter relay. In the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, Wilma ran with three Tennessee State runners to win a bronze medal in the 400-meter relay.

Four years later, Coach Temple was in Rome with his Tigerbelle runners, who made up most of the U.S. women’s track team. On September 7, 1960, the crowd cheered wildly as they watched the lightning fast 20-year-old ‘Tennessee Tornado’ outrun the field during the anchor leg of the 4 x 100 meter to win her third gold medal in the summer Olympics in Rome.

Three days before, Wilma had shocked the world by setting a world record in the 100-meter competition, with a time of 11.0 seconds to win her first gold medal. A day later she won gold in the 200-meter sprint, in a race that wasn’t even close. Less than a decade after ditching her hated corrective shoes, Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three Olympic Gold Medals in track and field, earning her the distinction of “The World’s Fastest Woman.”

Wilma went on to be inducted into the Black Sports Hall of Fame, National Women’s Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. Sports Illustrated named her one the 50 greatest sports figures of the 20^th Century. During her induction into the Track and Field Hall of Fame in New York City, Wilma Rudolph shared with those in attendance, “The doctor said I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother. She often reminded me that triumph can’t be had without the struggle.”