Goebbels financed filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking documentary of the Berlin Games. Olympia (1938) is not an overtly political film, but rather an attempt to link Nazi Germany to ancient Greece. Riefenstahl did not include the women’s 100 meters in her film or the women’s discus competition, although she did incorporate a montage of an ancient male Greek discus thrower with the nude German Erwin Huber in the famous coiled, ready position. Her camera fawns over the male athletes’ bodies, especially in the nighttime pole vault competition and the mesmerizing diving sequence at the end of the film. Despite Goebbels’s objection, Riefenstahl documented Jesse Owens’s wins as well, prompting some critics to highlight her Fascist infatuation with the perfect human male form and the implicit rejection of the physically handicapped.
Stephens, Walsh, and Krauss easily won their first preliminary heats. Stephens beat Krauss in the semifinals, running an 11.5. Dollinger edged out Walsh in the second semi, with both timed in 11.7. No one seemed capable of challenging Stephens. In sprinting, two-tenths of a second is an eternity, and deep down Walsh knew that unless Stephens was disqualified, fell down, or got injured, she would not repeat as Olympic champion. Walsh had to be healthy to have any chance, but the Polish press reported that she was suffering from a right thigh injury. German doctors told Walsh that she could not run in the final with the bad leg, but four Polish doctors said she was fit enough to start and gave her injections to deaden the pain.
The women’s 100-meter final was held the next day. Once again it was overcast and even colder, at sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit. It was the first time since Stephens’s win in St. Louis a year and a half earlier that the world’s two best female sprinters were squaring off. According to a United Press International reporter, “It’s written all over her [Walsh’s] face as she digs her starting holes with a shovel. Next to her is the girl who displaced her as the fastest femme—Helen Stephens, the country girl from Missouri. Helen laughs as she readies herself for the run down the straightaway. She knows she is tops.”35 Dollinger was in lane one, Stephens in lane four, Krauss in lane five, and Walsh on the outside in lane six. Stephens could see Walsh from the middle lane.
At the starter’s gun, Stephens got off the line together with Krauss and Dollinger, while Walsh lagged behind, her start slowed by the injury. After thirty meters, Walsh was fourth. According to the Official Record of the Berlin Olympics, “by the 50 meter mark she [Stephens] had left all her competitors behind and sprinted across the finishing line in 11.5 seconds with a running style that many men athletes might well envy.”36 Stephens cruised to the tape in an Olympic record time, Walsh came in second at 11.7, and Krauss was third at 11.9. Stephens’s Olympic record stood for twenty-four years, until U.S. sprinter Wilma Rudolph broke it at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Disappointed but resigned to the fact that Stephens was simply faster, Walsh congratulated her with a handshake and even managed a faint smile. A photo of the three medalists on the awards stand during the playing of the U.S. national anthem captures Krauss’s right arm raised in the Nazi salute, Stephens in a traditional military salute, and Walsh, looking forlorn, with her arms at her side. If Walsh had run for the United States in 1932, American women would have won three straight 100-meter gold medals.
On the same day as the women’s 100-meter final, Jadwiga Wajs placed second in the discus. Przegląd Sportowy [Sports Review] hailed “our brave women” with the headline, “Two Starts, Two Silver Medals.”37 “Bravo!” declared Kurjer Warszawski upon Walsh earning the silver medal, while pointing out that she had been bothered by a bad leg.38 Indeed, the performances of the Polish women far outdid those of their male counterparts. Maria Kwaśniewska took bronze in the javelin, giving the Polish women three medals. Although the Polish men outnumbered the women 127 to seventeen at Berlin, they also brought home three medals (one silver and two bronze), but none in track and field. The other big Olympic news in Polish newspapers was the success of the Polish soccer team, which reached the semifinals before losing to Austria. The Polish press proudly reported that on the medals table, Poland came in fifteenth of the forty-nine participating countries.
Walsh congratulating Stephens on her victory in the 100 meters at the Berlin Olympics. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].
The Poles were disappointed that their “flyer” had lost the most prestigious medal in track and field, but it came as a surprise when a Polish journalist from Kurjer Poranny [Morning Courier] hinted that Stephens was not really a woman. It smacked of sour grapes for the Poles to call her a cheat. One paper suggested that Helen should be called “Henry.” On August 4, 1936, Kurjer Warszawski wrote,
[Stephens] could not have been more comfortable running around in Berlin, even if the Olympics had been held in the time of Frederick the Great: without any doubt she would have been drafted into the grenadier’s regiment. Miss Stephens does not betray femininity. She has broad shoulders, fully masculine arm muscles and legs, and runs like men. In this [record] time Stephens would have gotten the top place in the Polish men’s championships.
The Associated Press relayed the story to several prominent American newspapers. It was rumored that the IOC had forced Stephens to undergo a visual examination from German doctors, which she passed. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Stephens’s mother was incredulous: “Helen is absolutely a girl. I had better not say what I think of anyone who would charge that she is anything else. No one else in all Helen’s life has ever raised such a question. Helen leads a normal girl’s social life. She enjoys dancing and attending dances regularly at college.”39 The controversy continued in February 1937, when Look magazine ran a photo of Stephens next to an article titled “Is This a Man or a Woman?”
Evidently Hitler saw something he liked in the 5-foot-11, 165-pound sprinter from Missouri. After the 100-meter final, he invited Stephens back to his reception room beneath the stands. The Volkischer Beobachter published a big front-page photo of Hitler giving Stephens an autograph. According to Stephens, who sometimes embellished her stories, Hitler made a pass at her and invited her to his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden: “He came into the room and gave me this Nazi salute. Well, I just gave him an old-fashioned Missouri handshake, but that didn’t seem to faze him none. He even pinched me and invited me back to his place for the weekend, that old rascal.” Stephens also claimed that Hitler told her, “You should be running for Germany. You’re a true Aryan type, tall, blonde, blue eyes.”40
Several days later, Stephens won another gold medal in the 4 × 100 relay when the favored German team, including Krauss and Dollinger, dropped the baton on the last pass to Ilse Doerffeldt. The Germans were leading at the time, but Stephens probably would have caught Doerffeldt on the last leg. Newsreels showed Hitler throwing up his hands in despair when the German team fumbled the pass.
Forty years later, Walsh gave an interview to a Connecticut journal claiming that after the 100-meter final, Hitler had made a pass at her as well:
Hitler wanted to show Poland what a good neighbor he was. He came down and put his arm around me, shook my hand, and introduced me to [Heinrich] Himmler, Goering, and his whole clique. Even though I had finished in front of two German girls who were supposed to win, he made a big fuss for the press about how happy he was to have a Polish girl win a medal.41
If these stories are true, there was an epidemic of romantic advances at the Olympics. Even Riefenstahl got into it. She claimed that when the stadium lights went down for the decathlon awards ceremony, gold medalist Glenn Morris “headed straight to me. I held out my hand and congratulated him. Then he grabbed me in his arms, ripped off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators.”42 Of course, this was not the only time that the most famous Nazi film director hedged the truth. After the war she claimed that she had had little to do with the Nazi regime.
Both Stephens and Walsh
were probably flattered by the attention they got from the leader of one of Europe’s great powers, even if the guy was pasty white, doughy, and homely. From the inception of women’s events at the Olympics, women athletes had struggled to gain acceptance. They were often ridiculed for breaking customary gender roles and their lack of femininity. Their critics grew louder two years after the Berlin Olympics, when a story broke about the sex of German high jumper Dora Ratjen. Ratjen won the German high jump championship before the Olympics, but teammate Elfried Kaun won the bronze medal in Berlin with a jump of 1.60 meters, matching Bergmann’s personal best. Ratjen jumped 1.58 meters, placing fourth and just missing the medal stand. Ratjen’s finish precluded any further inquiry into her somewhat odd behavior and questions about her masculine voice. Amid the discussion about the women athletes at the Berlin Olympics who looked like men, the German press wrote that the deepest voice actually belonged to Helen Stephens:
[She had] a raw cowboy bass voice that sounded as if it came from a deep ravine. . . . On the first days, when this had not yet generally got around, there was always a bit of a panic in the Friesenhaus when Helen Stephens’s masculine voice echoed through the corridors, for every girl of course thought that some male visitor had crept into the building, and that it was strictly forbidden.
Velma Dunn, the American silver medalist in the 10-meter platform dive, noted that Stephens acted “very mannish” and talked “lower than most men.”43
Bergmann had roomed with Ratjen several times at high-jump competitions. Bergmann found her “strange” for avoiding the shower room with other women, wearing swim trunks in the locker room, and preferring to use a private bath, claiming that she was a little shy. Other athletes had made some of the same observations about Walsh’s behavior.
Two years later, at the European Athletic Championships in Vienna, Ratjen won the high jump with a world-record jump of 1.70 meters. Walsh was there too, winning the 100 and 200 meters. As Ratjen got off the train from Vienna in Magdeburg, she was apprehended by the local police. Ratjen was charged with impersonating a woman, and her European championship medal was confiscated. Ibolya Czák of Hungary was moved up to first place.
The case was an embarrassment to the Reich. In 1939, the Magdeburg prosecutor dropped charges against Ratjen because she had lived as a woman her entire life, although she had now changed her gender identity and name to “Heinrich”: “Fraud cannot be deemed to have taken place because there was no intention to reap financial reward,” the prosecutor argued. “His activities and relations were always feminine.”44 Westerners were inclined to believe that the unscrupulous Nazis were behind a conspiracy to have Ratjen pose as a woman to win the high jump at Berlin, supposedly to make up for banning Bergmann.
Given the brutal character of the Nazi regime, many assumed that Hitler and his henchmen would go to any lengths to win, even by putting Ratjen up to the scam. During the Cold War, the West suspected the same gender-bending shenanigans of the Soviet Union. When Soviet women began to dominate the Olympics in the 1960s, the sex of some of the most successful Soviet women athletes, for example, sisters Tamara and Irena Press, was questioned.
In 1966, Time magazine falsely quoted Ratjen blaming the Nazis for concocting the hoax. Ratjen supposedly said that he ran “for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany. For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull.” Bergmann also saw it as a Nazi plot to replace her.45 Germany easily topped the list of medal winners at Berlin anyway, capturing thirty-three gold, twenty-six silver, and thirty bronze medals.
The doctor who delivered Ratjen in 1918 determined that she was a girl, and she was raised that way all of her life. But early in puberty, Ratjen began to question her gender designation: “My parents brought me up as a girl,” Dora told authorities after her arrest in 1938. “I therefore wore girl’s clothes all my childhood. But from the age of ten or eleven I started to realize I wasn’t female, but male; however, I never asked my parents why I had to wear women’s clothes even though I was male.”46 There was precedent for Ratjen’s case. Czechoslovakian Zdenka Koubka was a world-class middle distance runner in the early 1930s, and shortly after the Berlin Olympics she declared that she was transitioning to be a man. “I always thought I was a girl for the first part of my life,” Zdenka told reporters. “And then about a year ago I began to realize that I wasn’t a girl. Downy hair began to grow on the side of my face, and my manhood began to assert itself.”47 In 2009, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that there was no evidence that the Nazis had anything to do with a conspiracy to put Ratjen on the women’s team.48
These controversies provided fodder for Olympic functionaries who had opposed women competing in track and field events from the start. After the Berlin Games, Brundage declared, “I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors . . . [their] charms sink to less than zero. As swimmers and divers, girls are beautiful and adroit, as they are ineffective and unpleasing on the track.”49 Many of those who opposed women participating in track and field thought that swimming and diving were acceptable for females, but Velma Dunn recalled the following after she returned from the Olympics:
At the end of the first week at USC [University of Southern California], the head of the department called me in, and she said that she hoped that I wasn’t going to continue my competition, because it wasn’t ladylike. That’s the first time I had ever thought of diving as not being ladylike. . . . I didn’t dive for two years.50
None of the three ascendant women in American track and field in the 1930s, Walsh, Stephens, and Didrikson, were physical beauties in the classic sense. Their relatively plain and muscular traits did little to counter the existing biases about women athletes. As historian Jennifer H. Lansbury observed, “Their working-class backgrounds and ‘mannish’ appearances upset the middle-class sensibilities of physical education instructors, pushing women’s track and field even further to the margins of white society.”51 Many fellow athletes commented on Walsh’s masculine looks and unwillingness to change in the locker room before and after meets; Canadian Olympian Roxanne Atkins Andersen remembered that Walsh had insisted on a private dressing room. Jean Shiley, the high-jump gold medalist at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, called Walsh “strange.”52 Years later, Krauss’s teammate Marie Dollinger, who finished fourth in the 100 meters at Berlin, remarked sarcastically, “You know, I was the only woman in the race.”53
A week after the Olympics, Walsh and Stephens raced again in a meet in the western German town of Wuppertal. Stephens soundly beat Walsh twice in the 100 and 200 meters, leaving no doubt about who was the fastest woman in the world. It was the last time the two rivals would step foot on the same cinder track. A few days later, Walsh returned to Warsaw to set an unofficial world record in the 80 meters.
In late September 1936, Walsh took the Batory from Gdynia back to New York. She was unhappy with her life in Poland, which had been a disappointment. Despite her Polish background, she was an American through and through, and was used to a vastly different lifestyle, a higher standard of living, and the familiarity of her hometown of Cleveland and the nurturing of her family and fellow Polish Americans. The fact that Walsh spoke Polish fluently was not a strong enough link to her country of birth. On October 11, she was back home in Cleveland.
Athletes need a foil to amplify their accomplishments and fame. In the 1960s, golfer Arnold Palmer had Jack Nicklaus; in the 1970s, Muhammad Ali had Joe Frazier; and in the 1980s, the Boston Celtics and Larry Bird had the Los Angeles Lakers and Magic Johnson. Stella Walsh is often forgotten because her greatest potential rivals—Didrikson and Stephens—quit track. Walsh never mentioned Stephens as her greatest rival. Maybe Walsh acknowledged that the Babe was a great competitor because Didrikson competed in different track and field events than those she participated in and quit track to go golfing. Walsh always had the kindest words for Kinue Hitomi, calling her the finest woman athlete she ever met.
After the Olympics, Stephens returned to William Woods College in Fulton. She turned professional in 1937, playing basketball for the famous All-American Red Heads. Walsh returned to her old Blepp-Coombs team, but there is no record of their meeting on the basketball court. Stephens eventually formed the semipro Helen Stephens Olympics Co-eds, with backing from Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein. The Co-eds barnstormed the country before the war and again from 1946 to 1953. Stephens even traveled with the House of David baseball team, doing sprints and throwing the shot put. She was also an avid golfer, bowler, and swimmer.
In 1975, Stephens was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, along with her old rival, Stella Walsh. Like Walsh, Stephens could not walk away from the thrill of competition. A year before she died in 1994, the Olympic champion was still running in senior races.
6
The Greatest Woman Athlete
Naturally I would like to run for the United States this year, but I realize that is impossible. Since I am now a citizen here, it probably wouldn’t be considered patriotic to compete for Poland, but I would like one more opportunity to run in the Olympics.
—Stella Walsh before the 1948 London Olympics
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 13