Walsh now had to refocus on the 100-meter final. She was the only Pole in the field, but she was the odds-on favorite. She had gone to church the previous Sunday and said later, “I am sure it helped me.” The Olympics was not yet the spectacle it has become today, and the stadium was half empty. The few thousand spectators focused on the starting line as the sprinters dug out their holes in the cinder track.4
At Walsh’s coming-out party at the Millrose Games two years earlier, her competition had come from Canadian sprinters. Now Hilde Strike stood in the way of her Olympic gold medal. They barely knew one another, because Walsh did not spend much time at the Chapman Park Hotel hobnobbing with the other athletes. “She didn’t stay at the hotel with us,” Strike noted. “She was with her male coach all alone, all the time. She would come in her sweat suit and leave like that. . . . We never spoke more than ten to twenty words to each other the whole time we were in Los Angeles.”5
American Mary Carew, who ran the opening leg of the gold medal–winning 4 × 100-meter relay team, had met Stella Walsh many times. Her portrayal does not square with most characterizations of the shy, reserved Pole: “I don’t think I ever beat her in hundred meters outdoors,” Carew recalled. “I ran against her a lot. She wasn’t friendly. People don’t like pushy women; she seemed so big and aggressive, and didn’t know her place, according to us girls. . . . Young, unsophisticated kid was competing against this manly woman.”6 Walsh’s fluid running style also raised eyebrows.
Strike was not confident heading into the final. She thought that the track was too hard and did not feel comfortable in the California heat. “The climate bothered me,” she told reporters. “I’ve felt sick ever since I came.”7 Strike was in the third lane of the final. Walsh was two lanes to her right, in lane five. At the report of the starter’s gun, Strike broke from the line first and Walsh last. Polish officials later blamed the starter for waiting too long between saying “get set” and firing his gun. Von Bremen fell off the world-record pace as the Canadian struggled to hold off the bigger Pole. Walsh’s long strides caught Strike at the halfway mark, and they hit the tape in a near-dead heat. Strike lifted her arms toward the tape, while Walsh thrust out her chest to break it. The timers clocked both in 11.9 seconds. The so-called “Kirby camera”—an “electric and motion-picture timing device”—was used for the first time at Los Angeles. Although it was not official, the photo helped the judges declare Walsh the winner. Von Bremen finished third. The camera was also used to resolve the men’s 100 meters, which American Eddie Tolan won by a hair over teammate Ralph Metcalfe.8
At the awards ceremony, the three women climbed onto the perches of the medals podium, Walsh on top, Strike on her right, and von Bremen on her left. This was the first time the podium was used at an Olympics, along with the raising of the victor’s national flag and playing of the country’s anthem. Contrary to Coubertin’s vision of individual athletes competing to promote international cooperation and world peace, the Olympics had become a symbol of a nation’s power. The winner was announced as Poland’s Stanisława Walasiewicz; the 21-year-old stood on top of the platform with a gold medal and a world record in hand. Poland was ecstatic. Walsh expressed pride in her heritage and made reference to the hardships of Poles and Polish Americans:
I have always felt Polish, I have fervently desired, in order that for me and my countrymen who emigrated to America [that] the Mazurek Dąbrowski [the Polish national anthem] was played and the Polish flag was raised. For us, for Polish Americans, it was a matter of honor and reward for the many tough times that we repeatedly lived through in exile.9
Polish foreign minister August Zaleski sent a telegram congratulating Walsh for the gold medal. Kurjer Polski called Walsh’s victory a “heroic” effort. It was the only gold medal in women’s track and field that did not go to an American, and the Polish press made no mention that Walsh had lived all but the first year of her life in the United States. If Walsh had run for the U.S. team in 1932, she would have won two gold medals. Five days after Strike’s narrow loss to Walsh in the 100 meters, Strike’s Canadian relay team again lost by a nose to the United States in the 4 × 100-meter relay, with both teams clocking the same time (47 seconds). Mary Carew led off the gold medal–winning relay team, and von Bremen anchored. Other than Walsh, the Poles could not find three other world-class sprinters to field a competitive relay team.
Kusociński and Walsh were the most renowned athletes in interwar Poland. The POC concluded that their athletes’ showing at the Olympics was “tremendous for Polish propaganda abroad, and likewise electrified all of Poland.”10 Born three years before Walsh, also in Russian Poland, Kusociński became known as the “Father of Polish Distance Running.” When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, to start World War II, Kusociński fought with the Polish Army, earning Poland’s Krzyż Walecznych [Cross of Valor]. After Poland went down to defeat, Kusociński joined the Polish resistance. In 1940, the Gestapo caught the Olympic champion. One historian contends that the “largest single massacre of the [German] AB-Aktion [Extraordinary Pacification Operation] took place at Palmiry, when 348 men and women were shot on 20 and 21 June [1940]. Kusociński was among the victims.”11 Every year the northern Polish city of Szczecin holds the Kusociński Memorial Track and Field Meet. In 1969, IOC president Avery Brundage went to Poland to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the POC. One of his stops was to visit Kusociński’s grave in Palmiry.12
In 1932, the Polish government honored Walsh with the distinguished Gold Cross of Merit, and Przegląd Sportowy again named her Poland’s most popular athlete. Cleveland was happy for its native daughter but regretted that Walsh had not run for Uncle Sam. The Plain Dealer wrote, “Fleet Stella Walsh . . . deserted Cleveland’s unemployed to run and work for Poland.”13 W. J. Nowak, publisher of the Polish American paper Polish Daily Monitor, said, “I doubt if there will be such celebrations as have taken place before. We are glad to see Stella win, of course, but we would have been more glad [sic] if she had finished her nationalization and won as an American. We are Americans.” Plain Dealer columnist James Doyle joked, “Stanisława Walasiewicz of Poland seems to run even faster than did Stella Walsh of Cleveland.”14 One letter to the editor criticized the newspaper for questioning Walsh’s choice to run for Poland:
The law of self-preservation is first; by making contact with Poland, her first fatherland, her future is secure, and why should we begrudge her that? The United States seems to be none the worse for Stella’s absence, as the United States is in no danger of losing first place at the Olympics.15
Walsh’s gold medal in the 100 meters was the most coveted at the Olympic Games, because she could claim to be the “world’s fastest woman.” Americans won the other gold medals in the five women’s events at Los Angeles and half of the total medals. Babe Didrikson won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin, and a silver medal in the high jump. She became an instant celebrity in Los Angeles. “It was a good meet, and everything was swell,” she told the Los Angeles Times for its August 14, 1932, edition. “The only thing that bothered me was so many people coming out to see me. I like people, but I didn’t get any rest. One night I just had to take a car and ride around until I was sure that lobby [of the Chapman Park Hotel] was clear and that nobody would try and telephone me.”
In fact, the publicity did not really bother Didrikson, but it rankled some of her teammates. She was brash, boastful, and self-promoting. Olympic high-jump champion Jean Shiley recalled, “If you [or the press] weren’t paying any attention to her she would reach in her pocket and get out her harmonica and start to play, and she played it very well.” When Didrikson was told of U.S. swimmer Helene Madison’s gold medal–winning time in the 50 meters, she boasted, “I did it in three seconds less one day and wasn’t even tryin’.” Didrikson claimed there was no sport she could not do. She told U.S. diving gold medalist Georgia Coleman, “You haven’t seen me get goin�
� yet, have you? Nope, they won’t let me enter the swimming events, but I can show you all.”16
Evelyne Hall thought she had nipped Didrikson in the 80-meter hurdle final, but after huddling up the judges awarded the gold medal to Didrikson. After the race, as the judges were trying to determine the winner, Didrikson told Hall matter-of-factly, “I won.”17 Years later, Hall still thought that she had at least tied for the gold medal. “At the tape,” she said, “she put her arm up and turned her shoulder, and that was how the race was decided. I had a real cut, and my neck was bleeding in a semicircular pattern from the finish line.” Hall contended that Avery Brundage and other U.S. track and field officials had agreed that the race was a dead heat, and promised they would give her an unofficial second gold medal. That never happened.18
Walsh with U.S. Olympic gold medalists in Los Angeles, 1932. From left to right, high jumper Jean Shiley, Walsh, discus thrower Lillian Copeland, and hurdler Babe Didrikson. University of Southern California Special Collections.
Didrikson was the victim of some questionable judging in the high jump, however. Shiley said that some of the other competitors had wanted to claim a foul on Didrikson from the start of the competition, but Shiley declined to question the legality of Babe’s “western roll.” In a jump-off with Shiley, the judges disqualified one of Didrikson’s jumps because she led with her head, and Shiley was awarded the gold medal. Didrikson finished second.19 Shiley said later, “The fact is that the rules were very rigid on how you could jump. . . . Your shoulder could not precede your body over the bar.” She acknowledged that it was a “very bad time to call a foul.”20
Didrikson’s victories were among her many athletic triumphs. At the AAU Championships in Dallas in 1930, she won the baseball throw and javelin. The next year at the championships in Jersey City, where Eleanor Egg upset Walsh in the 100 yards, Didrikson took the 80-yard hurdles. Didrikson entered every event at the 1932 U.S. Olympic Trials at Evanston, winning five (not all of the events were on the Olympic program). Olympic rules limited her to competing in only three events.
Muscular, athletic women like Didrikson and Walsh were still considered abnormal. After the prelims and the final, Walsh did not shower with the other women or with her teammates. She immediately left the Coliseum for the Chapman Park Hotel, leaving some to wonder what she was hiding. Famous sports reporter Paul Gallico called Didrikson a “muscle moll . . . a hard-bitten, hawk-nosed, thin-mouthed little hoyden from Texas.”21 Didrikson was criticized for stepping outside of the assigned bounds of women’s proper place in society; she was even charged with being a homosexual. Gallico wrote, “Everybody in Los Angeles was talking about the Babe. Was she all boy? Or had she any feminine traits?”22 One college physical education teacher remembered her mother warning her about playing softball: “I just don’t want you to grow up to be like Babe Didrikson,” her mother had said.23
Many sports officials still thought that women’s track and field should be dropped from the Olympic program altogether. At a meeting of the National Athletic Federation at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel a week before the Olympics began, Agnes R. Wayman of Barnard College declared, “The women’s division feels that for the school or college girl, or girl of like age, the intense, intercompetitive [sic] program is not productive of better girls or better women.”24 One journalist wrote that women did not belong on the field of play, but in the water to swim.25
In 1932, Canadian sports editors selected Hilde Strike as Canada’s greatest female athlete. Canadian women’s Olympic team manager Alexandrine Gibb contrasted the petite Strike with the “big, husky Polish girl [Walsh] with the mannish frame.”26 One reporter lauded the Canadian women for their beauty and femininity, saying, “They constitute a denial in the flesh of the general idea that a woman athlete must be built like a baby grand piano and have a face like a hatchet.”27
Poland was no more progressive in promoting women’s sports. Eugeniusz Piasecki was one of the prominent Polish figures in youth physical education and sports during the interwar period. Piasecki began his career as a gym teacher in Lwów in Austrian Poland, and after the war he became a university professor in Poznań. Piasecki pioneered the Boy Scout movement in Poland but had no time for women running in shorts: “The loss of one of the most precious virtues of women,” he declared, is “namely the feeling of shame.”28
Women who challenged the normative gender roles were often ridiculed. When Dutch sprinter Fanny Blankers-Koen won four gold medals in the 1948 London Games, her neighbors bought her a bicycle “so she wouldn’t have to run so much.”29 Blankers-Koen was well aware of these rigid parameters, saying, “People applaud me because I do my training and winning between washing dishes and darning socks.30 Hurt by the criticism of her manliness, Didrikson tried to project a more feminine profile. On her way to the 1932 U.S. Olympic Trials in Evanston, the press reported that she had bought her first hat—a pink one at that.
Didrikson left track and field to take up the more refined game of golf. She began wearing makeup and lipstick, and married a professional wrestler. “I know I’m not pretty,” said Didrikson. “But I try to be graceful.”31 Didrikson excelled in golf too, winning fourteen straight championships in 1946–1947. After she beat Grantland Rice in one round, he said he had never seen a woman hit a ball like that.
Walsh’s mannish face and figure also caused her to be labeled a “tomboy” and resulted in bullying. One reporter noted, “She has a somewhat masculine form, and her legs are well developed.”32 Walsh later told the Plain Dealer that the one observation that she “prized above all others” came from University of Southern California track coach Dean Cromwell, who coached numerous Olympic champions. Said Cromwell,
It would be wrong to say that Miss Walsh runs like a man. Most men run the wrong way, and the Polish sprinting lady runs right. When I say right, I mean easily, keeping well relaxed and showing little effort. [Olympic gold medalist] Eddie Tolan runs that way, and he’s a pretty good sprinter too.33
Polish authorities did not care about the looks of Poland’s new champion. After all, a 100-meter Olympic gold medalist did not come along every day. After recognizing Walsh in 1930, the National Physical Education and Military Training Office gave her the Greatest Honor in Sport Award for three straight years from 1932 to 1934.
Walsh’s first exposure to the Olympics and Los Angeles left a powerful impression on the young woman. “The Olympic Games were wonderfully handled,” she told the Plain Dealer on August 13, 1932. “I do think some of the Polish team would have done better except for the heat.” According to an official POC report of the Los Angeles Games, the Polish team “left Los Angeles with sadness . . . [their days there] probably constituted the greatest time of their lives. California was, for them, the best coast of the ‘promised land’ of America.”34 On August 14, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jadwiga Wajs was in tears when she had to leave Los Angeles after the Games, saying, “I like it so much I don’t want to go home. I ask everybody where I can get a job, but I don’t find one. So I must go.” The Polish team’s chaperone told a reporter, “We’re not sure we can get her on the train, she wants to stay here so badly. We tell her to go see if she cannot find a husband and stay,” the chaperone joked. She might have been talking about Walsh, because she also loved the city.
On the train ride back to the East Coast, the Polish team made stops at the Grand Canyon, in Chicago, and at Niagara Falls. During the trip, the team was feted by Polish American delegations. The Polish Consulate threw a reception for the team in Chicago, and the city hosted a track meet. Kusociński won the 5,000 meters. In one of the few meetings between the world’s two greatest female athletes, Walsh bested Didrikson in the 100 meters, tying her world record of 11.9 seconds. Walsh also set a new world record in the 200 meters and won the broad jump. Didrikson took the high jump. Her second-place finish in the discus (to Wajs) was the only event in which Didrikson beat Walsh, who finis
hed fourth. On August 29, the Plain Dealer claimed that “Stella Walsh, Polish girl from Cleveland, stole the show from Babe Didrikson of Texas, star of the women’s branch of the Olympics.”
In early October, the Polish Olympic team boarded the Pułaski in New York for the trip back to Poland. In a team photo taken on the bow of the tugboat Macom (NY), which took the team to the ship, a somber Walsh is sitting in the front row in a dress and her Olympic blazer. Wajs is next to her wearing a white hat and white gloves. To her right is the dapper, suntanned Kusociński in an unbuttoned white shirt.
For the first time since she had left Wierzchownia as a one-year-old, Stella Walsh was going back to live in Poland. As part of her deal to run for Poland at the 1932 Olympics, she received a scholarship for a three-year course of study in journalism and physical education at the Warsaw Institute of Physical Education. Walsh had lived in Cleveland for nearly her entire life, but the twenty-one-year-old Olympic champion thought she would easily adapt to living in Warsaw. She spoke Polish at home, and the Polish American community in Cleveland had nurtured her education and athletic career. Walsh’s sense of Polishness was strong, and she had run races in Poland before. But this would be the first time that she would be away from home for an extended period of time. For the next four years, she lived on and off in Warsaw, running for Polonia Warszawa, Sokół Grażyna, and Klub Sportowy Warszawianka.
Walsh had blossomed from a shy, young immigrant girl from Cleveland into a globetrotting celebrity. No other female athlete of her time traversed the world as much as Stella Walsh, not even the great tennis player Helen Wills, who won seven U.S. and eight Wimbledon singles titles in the 1920s and 1930s. Wills won gold medals in singles and doubles at the 1924 Paris Olympics, but tennis was taken off the Olympic program until 1988. In the decade before the outbreak of war in 1939, Walsh competed in meets throughout North America and Europe, and she was the first foreign woman to run in a competition in Japan.
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 9