DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Sickly Child to Fastest Woman in the World

Imagine This: You’re born in a shack in the backwoods of Tennessee in 1940, and your home has no running water, no electricity, and no indoor plumbing.

 You were born two months early, weighing only a little over four pounds, and you were so frail that no one was even sure you’d survive.

 By age four, you’ve been stricken with scarlet fever, chicken pox, measles, mumps, double pneumonia, and polio. The polio leaves one of your legs partially paralyzed, and doctors predict that you’ll never walk again.

 Like other black families, your family has to deal with prejudice. Black people can’t sit with white people on buses, on trains, or in movie theaters. Black children and white children go to separate schools. And white doctors treat only white patients and black doctors treat only black patients.

 There is only one black doctor for your entire town’s black population, and the nearest hospital for black people is in Nashville—-more than an hour’s drive from where you live. But twice a week, you and your mother travel by bus to the hospital in Nashville to get treatment for your leg, and back home your family massages and exercises your weak leg.

 What hurts the most is that the local school won’t allow you to attend because you can’t walk. You continue to work hard on your leg exercises while you dream of walking and some day running.

 You’re eventually fitted with a heavy steel brace that supports your leg which means that you can finally go to school. But school isn’t the happy place you had imagined. You feel lonely and left out as you watch the other kids on the playground doing all the things you can’t do. Some of your classmates even make fun of your leg brace.

 You continue to exercise your weak leg while your family cheers you on, and by age twelve, you’re able to take the leg brace off for good.

 In high school you become the star of your basketball and track teams and your speed and agility attract the attention of Ed Temple, the track coach at Tennessee State University (TSU).

 In 1956, Temple invites you to attend his summer track program at TSU where you become much stronger and much  faster. Soon you’re traveling to races all around the country, and you even earn a spot on the US Olympic team--its youngest member

 At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, you don’t do well in the 200-meter event, but you and your team win a bronze medal in the 400-meter relay.

 After high school, you’re awarded a track scholarship at TSU which makes you the first member of your family to go to college. You remember what it felt like to stand on the winner’s platform at the 1956 Olympics, and you dream of getting another chance to win an Olympic gold medal.

 By 1960, you’re faster than ever and make the Olympic team again. And at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, you not only win three gold medals, but you set three new world records: in the 100-meter event, the 200-meter event, and the 400-meter relay.

 You have achieved the impossible by becoming the first American woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympics. Once known as the sickliest child in your hometown, you have become the fastest woman in the world!

                           “I can’t are two words that have never been in my vocabulary.”

                                                    Wilma Rudolph (1940-1994)

 Excerpted from Dare to Dream!: 25 Extraordinary Lives by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

 For More about Wilma Rudolph:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igl8DmcKRhQ

 Giving Back: Wilma Rudolph loved working with youth, and in 1981, she set up her own foundation to nurture young athletes and teach them that they, too, could succeed despite all the odds against them.

 Did You Know that Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals in the 1960 Olympics in spite of running on a sprained ankle?

 Something to Think about: What do you think kept Wilma Rudolph going when all the odds were stacked against her?

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!