Elizabeth “Betty” Robinson was born on August 23, 1911, in Riverdale, Illinois, a small community south of Chicago. She grew up as a lively, competitive girl who liked school plays, the guitar, and informal footraces at church socials. She already knew she was fast. Boys could not beat her to the corner store. What she did not know was that this ordinary gift would make her the first woman in Olympic history to win a gold medal in a track event, and that a plane crash would nearly end her life before she won another.
In the spring of 1928 she was a sixteen-year-old junior at Thornton Township High School in Harvey. One afternoon her science teacher and assistant track coach, Charles Price, saw her sprinting to catch a commuter train. The next day he timed her in a school corridor and told her she belonged on a track. There was no girls’ team, so she trained with the boys. On March 30, 1928, in her first official race, an indoor 60-yard dash, she finished second to Helen Filkey, the American 100-meter record holder. Weeks later, on June 2, in only her second outdoor race, she beat Filkey over 100 meters in a time listed at 12.0 seconds, matching the world record. Officials refused to ratify it as wind-aided. She went to the Olympic Trials in Newark, finished second to Elta Cartwright, and boarded a ship for Amsterdam. The 1928 Games were the first to include women’s athletics, and even that limited program of five events had been bitterly contested. The American women trained on a linoleum track laid on the deck of the SS President Roosevelt.
Amsterdam was only her fourth competitive meet. Robinson was the sole American woman to reach the 100-meter final. On July 31 she ran against Canada’s favored Fanny Rosenfeld. The finish was so close that Robinson did not know she had won until the flag went up. She equaled the official world record of 12.2 seconds and became, at sixteen, the youngest Olympic 100-meter champion, a mark that still stands. She later said she cried like a baby. Days afterward she added a silver medal in the 4x100-meter relay as Canada took gold. Back home she was a celebrity. She set a world record of 11.0 seconds for 100 yards in Chicago that September. In 1929 she won the AAU titles at 50 and 100 yards and another world record in the shorter sprint. She enrolled at Northwestern University, studied physical education, joined the rifle team and Kappa Kappa Gamma, and became the first woman awarded a varsity “N.” In March 1931 she set world records at 60 yards (6.9) and 70 yards (7.9). She was the favorite for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, to be held in her own country.
On June 28, 1931, a hot day, she went up in a light plane with her cousin, who was part-owner of the aircraft, hoping the air would be cooler. Shortly after takeoff the engine failed. The plane nosedived into a marshy field near Chicago. Both occupants were badly injured. The man who pulled Robinson from the wreckage believed she was dead. He put her in the trunk of his car, or on a truck bed, accounts differ, and drove her to an undertaker rather than a hospital. Staff realized she was still alive. She had a shattered arm, a leg broken in several places, a broken hip, a head wound, and internal injuries. She was unconscious for weeks. Doctors put a pin in the damaged leg, which ended up about half an inch to an inch shorter than the other. She spent months in a wheelchair and roughly two years learning to walk normally again. They told her she would never run. She missed the 1932 Games.
Robinson refused the verdict. She could no longer drop into a sprinter’s crouch because she could not bend the injured knee fully, so individual 100-meter racing was finished. Relays, which start from a standing position for later legs, remained possible. After three and a half years away she fought her way onto the 1936 Olympic team. Funding for the women’s squad was scarce; some athletes had to raise their own travel money. In Berlin she ran the third leg of the 4x100-meter relay with Harriet Bland, Annette Rogers, and Helen Stephens, the new 100-meter champion. Germany was heavily favored and had set a world record in the heats. In the final the German last exchange failed; the baton was dropped. Robinson ran a strong third leg and handed cleanly to Stephens. The United States won in 46.9 seconds. Eight years after her first gold, and after being left for dead in a field, Betty Robinson had a second Olympic gold medal.
She retired from competition after Berlin. In 1939 she married Richard S. Schwartz, an upholsterer. They had two children, Richard and Jane. She stayed in the sport as an AAU timekeeper, spoke for women’s athletic associations, and lived for decades as a private citizen whose story was better known among track historians than among the general public. In 1977 she was inducted into the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame. In 1996, at eighty-four, she carried the Olympic torch through Atlanta. She died in Denver, Colorado, on May 18, 1999, at the age of eighty-seven.
Robinson’s career lasted only a handful of years at the top, interrupted by catastrophe, yet it sits at the beginning of women’s Olympic sprinting. She won gold in the first women’s 100 meters ever contested at the Games, in only her fourth meet. She set or equaled world records across the short sprints. She came back from injuries that should have ended any athletic life and won again on a relay team in Hitler’s Berlin. The plane-crash story has sometimes overshadowed the racing, but the two halves belong together: a girl spotted running for a train, a champion at sixteen, a body rebuilt by will, and a second gold when no one expected another race from her at all. That is the record of Betty Robinson.