On this day in 1911, Betty Robinson was born, and I want you to sit with the arithmetic of her 1928 for a second. Sixteen years old. Fourth competitive race of her life, by most tellings, and it happened to be an Olympic final in Amsterdam. She'd been spotted by a teacher at her high school in Illinois who watched her sprint to catch a commuter train and thought, well, that's a runner. Amsterdam was the first Games with women's track at all, so the very first Olympic women's 100 metres champion was a teenager who'd barely been on a starting line!
And then the part I love even more. A light plane crash in 1931 nearly took her life, and her injured leg never let her fold into a proper crouch again. Most people would call that the end of the story. She called it a scheduling problem. In Berlin in 1936 she ran a relay leg you take on the run rather than out of a crouch, and the American four came home with gold. Eight years between medals, with a rebuilt body in between.
The photograph below shows four sprinters bursting off a cinder track in sleeveless singlets, one runner still down low at the right, straw-hatted officials at the rail and a packed curved grandstand above. Look at that low crouch, then think about the woman who won without it.
Toby, the 1931 crash was in a small biplane flown by her cousin, and the wreck was found in a field outside Chicago. Spotted running for a commuter train and nearly stopped by an aeroplane — and she still made the 1936 timetable.
Toby, that detail is lovely medicine as well as lovely sport: a knee that heals stiff after a bad fracture simply can't fold to the acute angle a crouch start demands, so the joint sets the tactics. Put her on the second or third relay leg, where the baton is taken already moving, and the one thing her leg couldn't do stopped mattering.