Rome 1960 by David Maraniss7/6/2023 ![]() She had gone from Olympic medalist heroine to expectant unmarried mother, alone and mortified.Ģ. In fact, she was about to give birth to a baby girl. ![]() If outsiders asked about her, Temple told them she had appendicitis. Now her freshman year in college was approaching, and Wilma was about to become a full-fledged Tigerbelle, but for the time being she was out of action. By her adolescence, after years of weekly bus trips for treatments at clinics in Nashville, she had overcome all that and blossomed into a lithe, flowing runner. At age four, she had endured scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and polio, crippling her left leg and forcing her to wear orthopedic shoes and metal leg braces for several years. ![]() ![]() All of her accomplishments had been stunningly against the odds, from the time she had been born two months premature, weighing less than five pounds. ![]() Since then, she had trained regularly at Temple's clinics for high school girls at Tennessee State and had graduated from Burt High in Clarksville, a tobacco town 45 miles northwest of Nashville, where she also starred in basketball. As a sixteen-year-old high school girl two years earlier, Wilma Glodean Rudolph had run with the Tigerbelles on the bronze-medal-winning 4 x 100 meter relay team at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. ![]()
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