—
Thousands of people descended on Los Angeles, traffic and crowds beginning at dawn on July 30. Everyone who owned a car also seemed to own tickets to the opening ceremony, and by early morning heavy traffic choked the roads leading to the Coliseum. Giggling children sat atop their fathers’ shoulders, pointing at the flags and blow horns and trinkets galore being sold by entrepreneurial vendors. Stylish ladies had carefully donned their Sunday best, while men sported their finest ties. Movie stars added a further touch of glamour. The crowds munched on roasted peanuts and guzzled down gallons of lemonade.
By noon on the big day, nearly twenty thousand people were seated, while outside thousands of visitors who had been unable to secure tickets milled about, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hoopla inside the stadium.
President Hoover had declined the invitation to attend the ceremonies, remaining in Washington to deal with what many considered to be more pressing matters. No one missed him. Those were grim days for most Americans, and many felt the president, who seemed oblivious to the suffering that the country was undergoing, bore much of the blame for the Depression. Few were surprised that he sent in his place Vice President Charles Curtis, who arrived from Washington to cheering crowds and carried an official welcoming letter from Hoover.
A loud cheer arose in the stadium as the clock struck two thirty. Vice President Curtis read Hoover’s letter, declaring the Games open. The national anthem was sung, led by nearly twelve hundred choir members and accompanied by a 2,050-piece orchestra. The crowd rose as the athletes marched out of the narrow concrete tunnel into the open stadium and the parade of nations began: Greece led the way, with the United States—the host nation—closing it out. Thirty-seven women in total were competing in Los Angeles: seventeen track-and-field athletes, seventeen swimmers, and three fencers. Anyone who was interested in women’s sports, however, was there to see only one: the famed Babe.
The American female athletes came from far and wide, from Massachusetts and Colorado, from Texas and Ohio, and from everywhere else in between. Those who had not previously attended the ceremonies entered the stadium grinning widely in their uniforms of white skirts and blouses and red vests. Like the rest of the women’s team, Babe had been forced to wear panty hose, an aberration for her, and her legs itched as if she were being bitten by fire ants. She stood scratching the back of one leg with the opposite foot, then repeating the action on the other leg. Yet, like everyone else, she was in awe as the flag was raised to the sound of the Olympic hymn and doves were released in the arena. The circular stadium gave her a sense of the scale of the event, and as her eyes swept over the crowds, she was overwhelmed. She marveled at how different all of it looked from Beaumont, even from Dallas. But she was aware that a darkness was still festering underneath.
Though there were many spectators who were thrilled to see women take part in the Games, discussions were still under way about whether or not they truly belonged alongside the men. Babe was not clueless; she read the papers and knew of the debates taking place around her. She also knew that track-and-field athletes, in particular women like her, were even more brutally judged than the other female competitors, and that, as the discipline’s most visible star, she often took the brunt of the insults. The short hairstyles most of the runners sported provoked unsavory taunts from reporters, who did not seem as skeptical about the women on the swim team as they did about them.
Babe did not need an explanation as to why reporters had taken a shine to the swimmers. Dubbed by the press the “American Mermaids,” they were admired, for they were slender, tall, and perfectly coiffed, manicured and perfumed, slick in the clingy bathing suits and pointy sandals they enjoyed wearing for no reason at all. One could not help but notice them, praised as examples of femininity, glamour, and style, and reporters appreciated them for their beauty more than they did for their athletic abilities. “They strut—and strut,” a reporter from the Associated Press wrote. “The sprinters, jumpers, and weight heavers never appeared until the time to do their stuff, and disappeared immediately afterward, [but] the femmes who gain fame…in aqua, are never out of sight….Many of them make a habit of parading—and then parading some more.”
The swimmers took great pride in their appearance, sometimes more than they did in their sport, they admitted. Eleanor Holm, in fact, told a reporter, “My appearance is more important to my life as a woman than my swimming championship.” Showing no reservation or shame, she continued, “If I had to choose between swimming cups and honors, and the loss of looks…I’d give up the championship.”
Babe was aware of what newspapers wrote of her, often not in flattering terms. They described her nose as too pointy and birdlike, her lips as too skimpy, and her eyes as too watery to be alluring. None of the reporters thought her pretty or attractive, and none had anything pleasant to relay to their readers. That she had no time for boyfriends or the intimacies that girlfriends shared seemed unusual to them, leading some to publicly speculate that she was a lesbian or maybe even a man masquerading as a woman. The prominent sports reporter Paul Gallico fueled the rumors the most. At one point he referred to her as a “Muscle Moll” and, puzzled, asked his readers whether they, too, thought she belonged to a third sex, neither male nor female but something in between. He was curious, he said, as curious as he was about “the bearded lady and the albino girl at the circus sideshow.” He further went on to describe her as “a hard-bitten, hawk-nosed, thin-mouthed little hodgen from Texas.” What struck him, and perhaps infuriated him more than anything else, was the fact that she refused to acknowledge the questions he asked, apparently lacking the emotions he was trying to elicit from her.
But it did bother her. She was a woman. But she suspected that her words would not have mattered; nor did she feel the need to explain herself. After all, it was her athletic skills that mattered most to her, that should have mattered to anyone else. Babe was not the only target. Reporters were also suspicious of Stella Walsh. Gaston Meyer, the editor of the French daily sports paper L’Équipe, wrote in an article, “This large brunette, of whom it is said that she shaves every day…”
—
Despite these being the second Games in which women could participate in track and field, many male athletes were still reluctant to accept them. A reporter named Westbook Pegler, who’d gone to Los Angeles to cover the athletes, and in particular Babe, agreed that their male counterparts were always complaining that “women’s place in the Olympics meets is in the water and not on land, and [so they] urge that they be…prevented from cluttering up the lot with delicate parodies of the mighty feats that males perform.” One paper acknowledged the men’s team’s gripes but noted that the crowds still appreciated the women: “Male athletes and most male coaches won’t take the feminine side of the Olympic Games any too seriously, but you will find the girls will have a continued appeal to the crowds in the stands. They will provide a refreshing variety, even if they don’t come close to male marks.”
Among those watching from the stands was Dick Hyland, who now worked as a journalist, though in the 1920s he had been an All-American football player at Stanford. He’d been assigned to cover the women’s track-and-field events, which to him seemed only a bunch of “comical antics.” He did not see the female athletes’ participation as a demonstration of physical feats but merely as silly scrambling from a group of little girls who should have stayed home, particularly as they hurried to the finish line.
—
Betty was not in attendance to defend her title, which opened the door to others who had always been defeated or overshadowed by her. The undisputed favorite was now Stella Walsh. Indeed, Stella crossed the finish line of the 100 meters in 11.9 seconds, well below the Olympic record, running down the cinder tracks “with a fury no other girl sprinter ever has known.” Although she had accomplished what many thought impossible, her achievements were—in Americans’ eyes—marred by the fact that she had not won for the United States. Even
as she crossed the finish line, she did not feel the acceptance that she had always craved from the Americans. Her neighbors in Cleveland agreed. “We are glad to see Walsh win, of course,” admitted the publisher of the Polish Daily Monitor, echoing not only Walsh’s but also the rest of the immigrant community’s sentiments. “But we would have been more glad if she had finished her naturalization and won as an American. We are Americans.”
—
Several events were disputed. Unlike at the 1928 Olympics, where a handful of close finishes had been left to the judges’ discretion to determine, in Los Angeles there was no possibility of such a controversy. The officials had thought of every detail, including the use of new technological innovations such as photo timing. In fact, the “Kirby two-eyed camera” was the latest in a string of apparatuses officials were trying to employ. The camera had been tested earlier that month at the US Championships and Olympic trials, where, found to be accurate to one-hundredth of a second, it was deemed reliable enough to include in the Olympics.
Within the US contingent, the relay team would go down in history for the choices Coach George Vreeland made in selecting its members: he picked only white athletes, though both Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes had qualified. “Times were different,” recalled Tidye years later. “Some people just didn’t want to admit that we were both better runners.” Tidye and Louise were relegated to the stands, where they watched as their teammates won the gold medal and set a new world record—without them.
Among the first results to be called into question was the 80-meter hurdles, in which Babe went head-to-head with fellow American Evelyne Hall. As the two reached the finish line, Babe had a nearly two-foot advantage between the fences, though Evelyne quickly caught up with her. By the end of the line, the two were matching strides, but Babe, being faster, managed to break the ribbon first, a mere two inches ahead of Evelyne, for the win. Aside from winning the gold, Babe also managed to set a new world record of 11.7 seconds.
A further dispute occurred in the high jump. Jean Shiley and Babe were tied for first place. Olympic rules did not allow for ties, and a winner had to be chosen by a jump-off. Babe went first, bringing up her legs and clearing the crossbar; Jean followed and also cleared the bar. But Babe was disqualified from the game, referees citing her technique. Her Texas hedge-jumping running style was a method she had developed, not as a way to cheat the system but out of necessity. Regulations dictated that the hurdles used in official competitions be about two inches thick. As a child, Babe had jumped over not competitive hurdles but garden hedges. The hedges were more than two feet wide, and the only way for her to clear them without ripping off her skin was to angle her right leg slightly inward as she jumped. She rightly pointed out that she had been doing so throughout the Games, including at the trials, up until the jump-off with Jean, and no one had complained. Her argument didn’t stick. She was suspended, and Jean moved to a winning jump of 5 feet, 5¼ inches, a new Olympic, world, and US record. Jean’s teammates cheered for her.
It did not matter. By the time the Olympics drew to a close, Babe’s records were undeniable. In the opening heat of the 80-meter hurdles, she had equaled the world record of 11.8 seconds, eventually breaking that record with 11.7 seconds in the final heat, winning the gold. And she continued the gold streak in the javelin, with a record throw of 43.69 meters.
—
Despite the commonly held idea that women could not compete alongside men, it seemed that by the time the Games ended many reporters agreed that Babe had done much to cement her legacy not only in sports history for herself but also for women athletes as a whole. Not everybody was caught up in the buzz. A few sports writers questioned whether or not there was actually any value to her records; whether what she had accomplished, when compared to a male athlete, was indeed all that extraordinary. “When you get down to the elemental, she didn’t do very much,” Joe Williams, a columnist for the New York World-Telegram, later wrote. “All the records she made were ordinary. The same year she became the greatest woman athlete in history, a comparative chart shows that she had not equaled one record made by a masculine high school champion of the same period.” To further undermine her accomplishments, he continued, “Instead of furthering admiration for her sex she had lowered it. By her championship and accomplishments, she had merely demonstrated that in athletics women didn’t belong, and it would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.”
Babe did not wait for the Games to end but quickly returned to Texas, where she planned to make the most of her victories and propel herself not only to national stardom but also to a paycheck that reflected her accomplishments. It was not something that a female athlete had done before, but she had studied the market and noticed that parlaying athletic victories into financial success had worked out for several male athletes. Male swimmers, such as Johnny Weissmuller, boxers and sprinters, and even some basketball stars who had reaped success in their respective fields had moved forward to gain financial advantages after the Olympics. Why should it be different for a woman? She had no interest in marrying anyone, she told the reporters who asked her if now that she had gotten athletics out of her system, she was ready to settle down and have children; she had no intention of getting hitched or birthing a herd of kids; she could take care of herself. She wanted to run and make a lot of money. People did not think that unusual for a man, did they? Why did it seem so strange for a woman?
—
Stella, on the other hand, kept the promise she had made to herself a few months earlier: she packed her medal and her bags, said good-bye to her parents and her sisters, and sailed to Poland on a hot August day. She was giddy as New York faded behind her; the typical insecurities of moving to a new place, though she had been born there, were nowhere to be found. She was eager to depart America, to leave behind all she had endured: the nicknames, the heartbreaks, the gossip and chatter that always seemed to follow her. In Poland, she had convinced herself, she would be known only as the Olympic great, not as Bull Montana.
Having received a full scholarship from the Polish Federation, she enrolled at Central University, an all-female institution in Warsaw, to study physical education and journalism for what would be a three-year stint. But the reality of a life in Poland soon became clear. In her native country, she felt like more of a foreigner than anywhere else she had ever been. She had fewer friends in her new home than she had made in Cleveland, and she found she was leading an even more solitary life than she had before. Everywhere she went, the pangs of loneliness accompanied her, and she came to realize that in the United States, though it was true that she had often been taunted, the reality was that she had also been admired and celebrated for her athletic abilities. People had looked up to her, and she had been accorded inches of space in the newspaper columns. In Poland, no one cared about her, either personally or as an athlete. It wasn’t long before she began to lament her decision to move to her native land.
Her insignificance revealed itself to her in January 1933, when she stepped across a railroad track on her way home and caught her foot, falling facedown. Something tore in her ankle. The pain she felt in that moment was great, but the horror of possibly never running again struck even deeper. There was no one to help her, and as she slowly got up and hobbled to a doctor, her pain magnified. The physician on call indicated that her ankle had been severely sprained but was also bleeding internally. There was, indeed, a possibility that she would never run again. She sent word to the Polish Olympic Committee but never heard back from it. No one there, it seemed, cared that an accident had occurred or that it could very well end her career. Poland had gotten out of her what it had set out to get: an Olympic medal.
Left to fend for herself, Stella now understood her grave mistake. None of this would have happened in America, in Ohio, where she was relatively famous, even doted on, despite her retiring disposition. She wistfully consoled herself with the knowle
dge that in Cleveland people would have cared; if she returned, they would do so once again. She had betrayed them, she had been made fully aware of that, but she hoped she might be given a second chance.
She was done with Poland for good; as soon as she could manage, she decided, she would sail back to Cleveland, hoping to try for US citizenship once again (she would not gain it until 1947) and to begin physical therapy to heal her ankle. She was broken in so many ways. But after six months of intense treatments, she resumed her training and began running again, participating in a Chicago meet where she crushed her competitors in her first meet on US soil again. It was good to be back, even if only for the event.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE NAZI GAMES
Now that the Los Angeles games were over, interest turned to Berlin, where Betty Robinson hoped to make her comeback. But as she read the newspapers outlining the upcoming events, she feared that these Olympics would never come to pass and she would never have a chance to return to the Games.
Berlin had been scheduled to host in 1916, but the outbreak of World War I had changed those plans. As time went by the city became anxious for a do-over, and in 1931 the IOC awarded the 1936 games to Germany again. Principally responsible for bringing the games to Berlin were Theodor Lewald, the president of the German Olympic Committee, and Carl Diem, whose post included a stint as the secretary of the Organizing Committee—both very well known in the German sports arena.
The Games signaled a sort of “welcome back” for Germany after the loss of World War I. By 1933, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the country’s government had devolved from parliamentary democracy into a dictatorship. Despite the political upheaval, AOC president Avery Brundage did not see the situation as too worrisome. The Olympic Games were administered by a worldwide organization that fell under the IOC umbrella; they did not belong to Germany or any other country; they followed international guidelines and not nationalistic views. Or so he believed.
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