The First Lady of Olympic Track: The Life and Times of Betty Robinson by Joe Gergen (review)

Joe Gergen, a sportswriter for forty years and author of several sports biographies, offers a brief account of an important but largely forgotten pioneer of women's sport in the United States and the early Olympic movement. Gergen makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, including Olympians' oral histories housed at the LA84 Foundation in Los Angeles.

Betty Robinson, a sixteen-year-old high school student in a Chicago suburb, was allegedly discovered by Charles Price, one of her teachers, as she ran to catch a commuter train and was encouraged to take up running as a sport. Only a few months later, in June 1928, she set a world record for the 100-meter run at the Central AAU meet in Chicago and won inclusion on the first American women's track- and-field team in the Olympic games. In Amsterdam, the child prodigy won the first women's Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter race with a new world record, only the eighth time she had run the distance in competition.

Gergen provides a good sense of Robinson as a person, with numerous quotes. An effervescent personality, she loved dancing, acted in high school plays, sang in the Glee Club, served as a class officer, and maintained an A average as a student, all while training at the Illinois Women's Athletic Club in Chicago. Upon her high school graduation, she entered Northwestern University, where she also captained and led the women's rifle team. Her expectations for the 1932 Olympics and her future were drastically curtailed in a 1931 plane crash, which caused psychological and physical trauma, and produced a limp and injuries that inhibited her ability to run. Gergen adequately details the fortitude and perseverance displayed by Robinson as she surmounted such obstacles to return to the 1936 Olympic team as a relay runner and gold-medal recipient.

The author does an exceptional job of contextualizing the societal obstacles faced by female athletes during the era, and Gergen devotes six full chapters to the 1936 Olympics, detailing the issues, controversies, boycott campaigns, and the roles of key players, particularly Avery Brundage. Unfortunately, he unearthed little on Robinson's sentiments regarding the political situation. He did, however, shed light on the little-known women's relay controversy. While the substitution of Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens for Jewish runners Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman in the men's 400-meter relay is well known, women's coach Dee Boeckmann similarly denied African American Tidye Pickett a chance to run by selecting Harriet Bland, her own club team member from St. Louis, after Bland lobbied hard for the position. The Americans won the gold medal when the favored German team dropped the baton on the final exchange with a sizable lead.

While Gergen's research and story are admirable, the book ends abruptly with a condensed version of Robinson's life after the Nazi Olympics. Her first marriage warranted only four sentences, and the remaining six decades of her life were described in a brief chapter. While comprehensive in his earlier treatment, Gergen borrows extensively from the works of others (including a three-page quote) for his analysis, not always with proper citation. Better copyediting might also have caught some historical errors, such as the contention that Robinson was the only Chicagoan to qualify for the 1928 Olympic team (23) and that she anchored the women's 4x400-meter relay team (47) in 1928. Johnny Weissmuller, another Chicagoan, was the swimming star of that Olympiad, and there was no 4×400 relay event for women until 1972.