Wilma Rudolph, the World's Fastest Woman Quiz

Answer: She was born prematurely.

Wilma Rudolph was a teeny 4.5 pounds at birth. She was the twentieth of twenty-two children. Her father, Ed, was a porter and her mother was a cook, laundress, and housekeeper. They were so poor that Wilma and her sisters wore dresses made from gunny sacks.

Answer: True

The local hospital in Clarksville, Tennessee, was for whites only, and the staff would not allow Wilma to receive its services. Wilma suffered from several illnesses in her early life, including measles, mumps, scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and chicken pox. Her mother, Blanche Rudolph, had to nurse her through these illnesses at home, as there was only one Black doctor in the county, and he was spread rather thin.

Answer: Polio

Afrer the polio struck, Blanche Rudolph took her daughter to Meharry Hospital, the black medical college of Fisk University in Nashville. Blanche traveled 50 miles with her daughter twice a year for two years until she was able to walk with a metal brace.

The staff instructed Blanche on the physical therapy exercises, which Wilma was able to do at home. With the help of her brothers and sisters, Wilma was able to thrive. By age 12, she could walk without crutches, braces, or orthopedic shoes.

Answer: basketball

In the beginning, Wilma Rudolph saw herself primarily as a basketball player, like her older sister. She fell in love with the game after her brothers set up a basketball hoop at home when she was only 11. Wilma excelled at the sport: she set a state record of 49 points in one game, and her team at Burt High School became state champions.

Her coach, Clinton Gray, nicknamed her "Skeeter". Wilma also ran track at Burt High School, though mainly to keep in shape between basketball seasons.

Answer: Tigerbelles

Twenty years before Title XI required schools and universities to provide athletics for girls and women, Ed Temple, a sociology professor, took over the women's track program at TSU as an unpaid coach. The team had only a $300 budget and a dirt track, which Temple paid to have the track lined at his own expense. The Tigerbelles managed to produce 40 Olympians and 34 national title winners during Temple's 44-year tenure.

Ed Temple spotted Wilma when she was in the tenth grade. He recruited her for his summer program at TSU, and she trained with the Tigerbelles for two years.

In 2009, Ed Temple received an honorary degree from TSU at the Fall Commencement. Beyond TSU, he served as women's track head coach for the U.S. Olympic teams in Rome (1960) and in Tokyo (1964), and for the U.S. team at the Pan-American Games and at a competition between the USA and China, both in 1975.

Answer: Melbourne, Australia

The Games of the XVI Olympiad were held in Melbourne -- except for the equestrian events, which were in Stockholm, Sweden. These were the first in the Southern Hemisphere.

At the 1956 Summer Olympics, Wilma won her first medal, Bronze, in the 4-by-100 relay with her teammates. She was the youngest member of the team. Also on the US women's team, Mildred McDaniel of Atlanta set a high-jump record of 5'9-1/4" (1.759 m). She became the first American woman to win a gold medal in track and field.

Answer: High Jump

Wilma Rudolph broke many records that day. She set a world record of 11.3 seconds in the 100-meter dash in the semifinals, then in the final round beat her own record with 11 seconds. Likewise, she broke the Olymic record for the 200-meter dash (23.2 secs) in the semifinals before winning the 200 (24 secs) in the final. Then her relay team, all from Tennessee State University, won the 4-by-100 relay in the final in 44.5 secs, another world record. Wilma ran this last race with a sprained ankle!

Anglophone newspapers called her the "world's fastest woman" and "the fastest woman in history" and gave her the moniker "The Tornado". The Italians nicknamed her "La Gazzella Nera" (The Black Gazelle) by the Italians and the French, "La Perle Noire" (The Black Pearl).

Answer: Jesse Owens

After her victory, Wilma Rudolph paid tribute to Jesse Owens, the 1936 Olympic champion who had been her inspiration. Jesse Owens. Also an African-American, Owens won four gold medals at the Games of XI Olympiad held in Berlin, and he set a world record for the long jump that year.

Many Germans became fanatic about Wilma Rudolph. In Cologne, mounted police had to control fans who flocked to see her. In Berlin, the crowd stole her shoes and then surrounded her bus and pounded it until she waved.

Interestingly, the events in which Rudolph won her medals (100m dash, 200m dash, and 4x100 relay) in 1960 were the same events in which Bobby Morrow had won at the previous Olympiad in Melbourne, just four years earlier, on the US men's team.

Answer: Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year

The year Rudolph won the Sullivan Award (1961), given only to amateur athletes, she visited with President John F. Kennedy. (Unfortunately, her father died that year as well.)

Wilma Rudolph also received the United Press Athlete of the Year in 1960, one the most prestigious athletic awards at the time. Her many other awards include:
- National Black Sports and Entertainment Hall of Fame (1973)
- National Track and Field Hall of Fame (1974)
- U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (1983)

Answer: It was the town's first racially integrated event.

Wilma Rudolph informed the governor of Tennessee that she would not attend any celebration that was segregated. The town of Clarksville acceded to her demand! The celebratory banquet afterward was also integrated. Thereafter, Rudolph participated in many civil-rights protests in her hometown and home state until the segregation laws were repealed or struck down.

Answer: Teaching

Wilma Rudolph retired from track in 1962 after winning a competition between the USA and the USSR. She taught second grade at her childhood school, Cobb Elementary, in Clarksville, Tennessee. She also became track coach at Burt High School after Clinton Gray, her old coach, died in a car accident.

Answer: Corporate consultant

Wilma Rudolph coached at various schools in Maine, St. Louis, and Detroit. In Indianapolis, she headed a community center. After living in Chicago for a few years, she eventually settled back to Indianapolis to raise her four children children from her first marriage, and there she hosted a local radio talk show. She also was a sportscaster on national television for a brief time.

Answer: Shirley Jo Finney

The autobiography was simply titled "Wilma." Rudolph worked with Cappy Productions as a consultant on the film. In one of his earliest roles, Denzel Washington played Wilma's high school sweetheart and first husband, Robert Eldridge.

Shirley Jo Finney later became the director of several regional theaters across the USA. Piper Carter played 4-year-old Wilma. Cicely Tyson played Wilma's mother Blanche and is best known for her title role in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman" (1974).

Born in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Réjane Magloire played 12-year-old Wilma, and she also played Samantha, a member of the Short Circus in the original "Electric Company" TV program on PBS from 1975 to 1977. She grew up to lead Indeep, an African-American new-wave band who recorded "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life".

Answer: Hubert Humphrey

In 1967, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey asked Wilma to help with "Operation Outreach", a program providing athletics to at-risk youths in the ghettoes of 16 major cities. She never forgot that experience, and in 1981 started her own foundation to provide free coaching and academic support. She felt the Wilma Rudolph Foundation was her greatest success.

The full quote is: "The triumph can't be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams."

Answer: Cancer

Wilma Rudolph had battled a brain tumor and throat cancer for months before succumbing at age 54. The year Wilma Rudolph died, Clarksville, Tennessee, named the part of U.S. Route 79 than runs through its borders the Wilma Rudolph Boulevard. Three years later, Governor Don Sundquist of Tennessee proclaimed June 23, her birthday, as "Wilma Rudolph Day". In 1996, the Woman's Sports Foundation gave its first Wilma Rudolph Courage Award to Olympic track champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Memorials for Rudolph continued for years, even overseas. In 2000 the Berlin school Gesamtschule Am Hegewinkel changed its name to "Wilma Rudolph Oberschule" in honor of her 60th birthday.