The Girl Who Was Told She Would Never Walk

Wilma Rudolph was born in 1940 in Tennessee, in the southern United States. She was tiny and premature, the twentieth of her father's twenty-two children. Her family was poor, and they lived in a time and place where Black Americans were kept apart from white Americans by law, in schools, hospitals, buses and almost everywhere else.

As a small child, Wilma was ill again and again: measles, mumps, chickenpox, double pneumonia, scarlet fever. Then, at about the age of four, she caught polio.

The brace

Polio is a virus that can attack the nerves that control the muscles. At that time there was no vaccine. It left Wilma's left leg weak and twisted, and her foot turned inwards. Doctors told her family that she might never walk normally.

Wilma had to wear a heavy metal brace on her leg.

The nearest hospital that would treat Black patients was in Nashville, about fifty miles away. For years, her mother took her there by bus, once or twice a week, for treatment. At home, her mother and her brothers and sisters learned to do the exercises and massages the doctors showed them, and they took turns rubbing her leg several times a day.

Wilma later said that she was lonely as a child. She could not run and play with the other children, and she was teased. But she was also stubborn. When nobody was looking, she would take off the brace and practise walking without it.

The day in church

By the time she was about twelve, she had worked hard enough that she no longer needed the brace. Her family later described a Sunday when she walked into church without it, down the aisle, while people stared. Soon afterwards, her mother wrapped the brace up and sent it back to the hospital.

Wilma did not just want to walk. She wanted to play. Like her sister, she took up basketball, and she was so fast and so determined that she became a star of her high school team.

A coach who noticed

At a basketball tournament, a track coach named Ed Temple, from Tennessee State University, saw her play. He ran a famous programme for young women athletes called the Tigerbelles, and he invited Wilma to train with them in the summer.

She was quick. In 1956, aged just sixteen, she went to the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, and won a bronze medal in the 4 × 100 metres relay.

That was only the beginning.

Rome, 1960

Four years later, at the Olympic Games in Rome, Wilma Rudolph was twenty. The day before her first race, she twisted her ankle badly. It swelled up, and she was worried she might not be able to run at all.

She ran.

She won the 100 metres, easily. She won the 200 metres. Then, in the 4 × 100 metres relay, with three of her Tennessee State teammates, she took the baton on the final leg after a clumsy handover, fell behind, and then caught and passed the runners ahead of her to win.

Three gold medals. She was the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field at a single Olympic Games. Newspapers around the world called her the fastest woman on Earth. In Italy they called her "the Black Gazelle".

Coming home

When she returned to her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, the town planned a parade and a banquet in her honour. Wilma found out that, like most things in the town, the celebrations were meant to be segregated.

She said she would not attend a segregated event.

The town changed its plans. Her homecoming parade and banquet became, according to many accounts, the first events in Clarksville's history where Black and white people celebrated together.

After the Olympics

Wilma Rudolph retired from running at the age of twenty-two. She became a teacher and a coach, and set up a foundation to help young athletes from poor communities. She spoke to children all over the United States about polio, about sport and about not letting other people decide what you are capable of.

She died in 1994, aged fifty-four. Her old high school, and many tracks and parks, are now named after her.

Want to read more?

Wilma Rudolph told her own story in her autobiography, Wilma, written with the filmmaker Bud Greenspan. For younger readers, Kathleen Krull's picture book Wilma Unlimited is a much-loved introduction.