Wilma Rudolph Wins Three Golds in Rome

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee, weighing just four and a half pounds. As a young child in nearby Clarksville, she suffered from serious bouts of scarlet fever and pneumonia before contracting polio as a young child. The illness left her left leg and foot paralyzed. Facing severe limitations in local medical care due to racial segregation, her mother took her on regular trips of roughly fifty miles each way to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Supported by these clinical visits, daily massage therapy administered by her family, and an orthopedic leg brace, she gradually regained strength and eventually walked without the brace, at an age that accounts place between about nine and twelve.

Rudolph soon channeled her renewed mobility into competitive sports at Clarksville's all-Black Burt High School. She excelled in basketball, setting a state scoring record, while also joining the track team. Her speed attracted the attention of Ed Temple, the track coach at Tennessee State University. Temple invited her to summer training camps in Nashville, bringing her into the university's renowned Tigerbelles program while she was still a secondary student. In 1956, at age sixteen, Rudolph earned a spot on the United States Olympic squad as one of its youngest competitors, traveling to Melbourne where she secured a bronze medal as the third runner in the four-by-one-hundred-meter relay.