Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph was an American Olympic sprinter whose 1960 Rome Summer Olympics performance produced three Olympic gold medals (100 meters, 200 meters, and 4x100m relay) — making her the first American woman ever to win three Olympic gold medals at a single Olympic Games. She was born Wilma Glodean Rudolph on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee (the 20th of her father's 22 children), into an African-American working-class Tennessee family. Her father Ed Rudolph was a Saint Bethlehem-area Pullman porter, and her mother Blanche Rudolph was a homemaker.

Her childhood was shaped by multiple chronic illnesses — particularly her four-year-old polio infection (which produced her left-leg paralysis), her four-year-old double-pneumonia infection, and her four-year-old scarlet fever infection. Her five-year-old polio recovery — across which her mother and sisters massaged her left leg four times daily across the next eight years — produced her gradual ambulatory recovery and her 12-year-old running engagement.

Her high-school career at Burt High School in Clarksville, Tennessee under coach Clinton C. Gray launched her early-career American track-and-field public profile. Her 1956 first Olympic-Games appearance at the Melbourne Summer Olympics — at age 16 — produced her 1956 Olympic 4x100m relay bronze medal.

Her 1960 Rome Summer Olympics performance — across August 25 to September 11, 1960 — produced her three Olympic gold medals (100 meters in 11.0 seconds, 200 meters in 24.0 seconds, and 4x100m relay in 44.5 seconds). The Rome Olympic 4x100m relay anchor leg — across which she received the relay baton in fourth place and overtook the East German, Soviet, and British relay anchors to win — produced her American Olympic public profile. The 1960 Olympic three-gold-medal performance was watched by approximately 200 million international TV viewers (one of the first Olympic Games ever broadcast by international television satellite). She was named the 1961 Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. She died on November 12, 1994, at age 54, in Brentwood, Tennessee, of brain-and-throat cancer.

Her name Wilma derives from the Old Germanic feminine form of William (meaning "resolute protector"). Wilma was a popular American girls' name through the early 20th century.