The Backstory: Back from the dead to take the gold

At age 16, Betty Robinson ran in the 1928 Olympics, the first games that allowed women to compete in track and field. She won gold and tied a world record. Three years later, she was in a horrific plane crash. Thought to be dead, she was taken to an undertaker. But her incredible determination and unbelievable recovery led her to another Olympic gold medal.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Try to imagine this. You're sixteen years old and you
win Olympic gold in track and field. Three years later,
you're in a horrific plane crash. They think you're dead,
but despite permanent injuries, you come back to win another gold.
Five years later, I'm Patty Steele, beating life and death
odds to take home the gold. That's next on the backstory.

(00:26):
The backstory is back. Goda admit, it's pretty amazing to
watch Olympic athletes compete when you know the incredibly hard
work and skill it takes to get there. But it's
also something more. It's this determination to never give up.
Nobody has embodied that mindset more than Elizabeth Robinson, known

(00:47):
as Betty. She was born in nineteen eleven in Riverdale, Illinois.
She loves sports, but in those days, very few women
were all that involved in that world. So how did
she go on to win gold as a teenager. Well,
one afternoon, she was leaving her high school and trying
to catch her train home. She took off like the wind.

(01:08):
Her science teacher, Charles Price, was headed for the same train,
and while he was blown away by her speed, he thought,
she's never going to make that train. You know that feeling.
But once on board, he was shocked when she sat
down right next to him. Turns out that teacher Charles Price,
was a former athlete and the coach of the school's
track team. He decided he wanted to try to test

(01:30):
her speed and asked her to meet up with him
the next day. After testing, he saw the makings of
a star. He instantly invited her to join the boys team,
since there was no girls track team at her school
in those days. Betty knew she was fast, but had
never thought about competing. She said, I had no idea
that women even ran back then. Through pure talent and

(01:53):
a bit of coaching, Betty ran her first official race
on March thirtieth, nineteen twenty eight. She was just sixteen
years old. It was an indoor meet, and she finished
second to Helen Filkey, the US one hundred meter record holder.
They ran the sixty yard dash. At her next race,
two months later, she ran outdoors in the one hundred

(02:13):
meter race and beat Pilkey. She also unofficially equalled the
world record. So get this. Just four months after her
first ever race, she headed to the nineteen twenty eight
Olympics in Amsterdam. The first Games where the Olympics allowed
women to compete in track and field. It turns out
she was the only US athlete to qualify for the

(02:35):
one hundred meter final. In just her third ever one
hundred meter race, Betty beat the competition and equalled the
world record of twelve point two seconds. To this day,
she is the youngest athlete ever to win Olympic gold
in the one hundred meter. On top of that, she
brought home silver with the four by one hundred meter

(02:55):
relay team. She talked about winning that first gold in
an interview sixty years later, saying, I can remember breaking
the tape, but I wasn't sure that I'd won. It
was so close. But then my friends in the stands
jumped over the railing and came down and put their
arms around me, and then I knew I'd won. Sixteen.

(03:16):
Bringing home the gold from the Olympics a massive parade
given in her honor when she arrived back in Chicago.
You'd think that was kind of the apex of her
athletic career. Right, Not even close. She aimed to head
to the nineteen thirty two Olympics in Los Angeles, and
she went to Northwestern University to get a physical education degree,

(03:36):
hoping to become a coach at the nineteen thirty six Olympics.
But all that changed in the blink of an eye
on June twenty eighth, nineteen thirty one. It was a
year ahead of the thirty two Games, and Betty was
the hot favorite for gold. On that June day, she
wanted to distract herself from all the training, and she
decided to go on an airplane tour with her cousin, Will,

(03:59):
who was a pilot, and she wanted to become a
pilot too. Okay, it's not long after takeoff an engine
problem forces the plane into a steep nosedive. There's a
terrible crash, and witnesses think Betty and her cousin Will
are dead, but Will is taken to the hospital, and
instead of taking Betty there, the man that found the

(04:20):
wreckage tosses her body in the trunk of the car.
Believing she's dead, he takes her to an undertaker. Now
we're at the morgue and the undertaker sees her breathing
just faintly. He realizes she's still alive. She's finally sent
to the hospital with numerous broken and cracked bones. While
both Betty and will survive, they're horribly injured. Betty remains

(04:43):
unconscious for two months and when she wakes up, they
tell her she'll never walk without a limp, much less
run again. For six months she's in a wheelchair, and
she then spends two years in rehab. The whole time
she's totally focused on getting back to co competitive sprinting.
But here's the problem. Sprinting requires starting from a crouched position,

(05:06):
and Betty can no longer bend her leg fully at
the knee due to the pins holding the bones together,
so she can't crouch for the start. On the other hand,
after rigorous training, she's still really fast, fast as the wind.
So she tries out for the nineteen thirty six Olympic
team in relays, and she makes it. At the Berlin

(05:31):
Olympics that year, Betty Robinson wins her second gold medal
as a member of the US four by one hundred
meter relay team. Her daughter Jane later said the first
gold medal was not as important to her as her
nineteen thirty six medal. The first was easier. It was
just a few months after she started running competitively. But

(05:51):
for the second gold. She had to work her tail
off to get back from that injury. That medal was
the reward for her determination to recover. Betty retired after
the Berlin Olympics at just twenty four years old, but
she stayed involved in athletics as an official and as
an advocate for women in sports. She also married, had

(06:11):
two kids, and worked in a hardware store for many
many years. In nineteen seventy seven, she was inducted into
the US National Track and Field Hall of Fame, and
in nineteen ninety six, at the age of eighty four,
she carried the Olympic torch for the Atlanta Olympic Games.
Finally suffering from cancer and Alzheimer's disease, Betty Robinson died

(06:33):
at the age of eighty seven. She was and is
the embodiment of the Olympic motto Sidius Altius Fortius, swifter, Higher, Stronger.

(06:55):
Hope you're enjoying the backstory with Patty Steel, Follow or
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(07:19):
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
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Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't

(07:41):
know you needed to know.