Word: didrikson
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There have always been women heroines at the Olympics, but they were seen as the exceptions. Although Babe Didrikson at 20 commanded the 1932 Games, she was nicknamed "Muscle Moll" and treated as some kind of miracle instead of a person who had been in training for ten years. In 1960, after Wilma Rudolph astonished the world by winning three gold medals, the press expressed surprise that off the track she wore skirts...
Last Saturday the ritual was re-enacted, enlarged considerably from the 39 nations in 1932 to 140 this year. The players were new; no Babe Didrikson to marvel at. (When the Babe, who had mastered a dozen sports, was asked if there was anything she did not play, she said, "Yeah. Dolls.") The audience for the Games promises to be up a bit: 510,000 in 1932, more than 2 billion now. Saturday's show was brighter, brassier. Still the basic ceremony held its ground. All the excitement generated by seeing the stairway ascend to the Coliseum torch...
DIED. George Zaharias, 76, huge, exuberant, cauliflower-eared professional wrestler who gave up his own highly successful career to manage that of his wife, Mildred ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias, the top all-round woman athlete in the world until her death of cancer in 1956; of kidney and heart disease; in Tampa...
...following days, records were broken, and reputations were made by such athletes as Babe Didrikson and Buster Crabbe. The most sensational events were men's track and field, in which new world marks were set nearly every day. Probably the most heart-stopping was the 5,000-meter run: Ralph Hill, a hitherto unknown American, raced after the world-record holder, Finland's Lauri Lehtinen. Hill tried to pass him on the outside, then the inside, and was finally beaten in a virtual dead heat. The largely American crowd was angry at first, believing that the Finn...
...Olympic Track and Field Trials have traditionally been the first step on the road to medaled glory. Newcomers became stars and stars household words during the quadrennial head-to-head competition to select the members of the American Olympic team. In the 1930s, Babe Didrikson and Jesse Owens came to national attention at the Trials, foreshadowing the performances that made the 1932 Los Angeles and 1936 Berlin Games memorable. Last time, a hurdler named Edwin Moses set an American record in the 400-meter hurdles. He went on to etch a world mark at Montreal in 1976 and has since...