George Poage first Black Olympic medalist
Poage makes history as the first Black American athlete to win an Olympic medal when he wins bronze medals in the 1904 St. Louis Olympics in the 200-meter hurdles (since discontinued) and the 400-meter hurdles. Poage competes despite many prominent Black leaders calling for a boycott of the Olympics that year because organizers had built segregated spectator facilities for the event and refused to integrate the Olympics or that year’s World’s Fair in St. Louis. Poage, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, is also the first Black athlete to win a race in the Big Ten Conference track championships.
08/31/1904
First African American to win an individual gold medal in the Olympics
In 1924, William DeHart Hubbard became the first African American to win an individual Olympic gold medal. During his senior year at Michigan (1925) Hubbard set the world record in the long jump. While the football coach, Fielding Yost, had barred African American players from football since 1901, in 1921, then Athletic Director Yost allowed one African American to join the track team. Hubbard was the only African American track team member during his four years at U-M.
01/01/1924
DeHart Hubbard first Black Olympic gold medalist
Hubbard becomes the first Black American athlete to earn an Olympic gold medal when he wins the men’s long jump at the 1924 Paris Olympics. In a meet in Chicago in June 1925, Hubbard set a long jump world record of 7.89 meters (25 feet, 10 ¾ inches), and a year later in Cincinnati, equaled the world record in the 100-yard dash (9.6 seconds). Hubbard worked for the Cincinnati Public Recreation Committee after graduating from the University of Michigan. In 1942, Hubbard moved to Cleveland where he became a race relations adviser for the Federal Housing Authority until his retirement in 1967.
07/08/1924
Olympic champion helps create Black History Month
Ralph Metcalfe was a public servant and Olympic champion. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Metcalfe was second in the 100-meter dash behind Jesse Owens, and teamed with Owens and two others on the gold-medal and world-record setting 4×100 relay team. He also won the silver medal at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1932 in the men’s 100-meter dash and a bronze medal in the 200-meter dash. After his athletic career, he served four terms as a city council member in Chicago before serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971-78. Metcalfe was a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, and in 1977 introduced the resolution officially designating February as Black History Month, which became law in 1986. Committed to fighting against racism, Metcalfe said, “In the caucus we have decided to put the interests of Black people first—above all else, and that means even going against our party or our political leaders if Black interests don’t coincide with their positions.”
08/01/1932
Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin
Owens won four gold medals in the long jump, 100 and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. During the Games, Owens and German athlete Luz Long forged a friendship and proved that competitors can also be allies. After Owens defeated Long in the long jump, the two celebrated together in a gesture of sportsmanship and friendship and a classic example of the unifying nature of sport. When Owens returned to the U.S., however, he still faced racism in a segregated country and was never even congratulated by the White House for his record-breaking Olympics. Owens said “Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me.”
08/01/1936
Victoria Manalo Draves becomes first Asian American Olympic Champion
Growing up in San Francisco as the daughter of a Filipino father and English mother, an early coach makes Manalo Draves use her mother’s maiden name in swim and dive competitions as at that time interracial marriages are looked down upon. She also faces a regular indignity when using public pools as the water would be drained the day after she uses it each time. On August 3, 1948, Manalo Draves becomes the first Asian American Olympic Champion, placing first in the women’s three-meter springboard at the 1948 London Summer Olympics. After the Olympics, Manolo Draves and her husband open their own diving school. She is inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1969.
08/03/1948
First Asian American Man wins Olympic gold medal
Sammy Lee becomes the first Asian American man to earn an Olympic gold medal, winning in platform diving during the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.
08/05/1948
Coachman first Black woman to win Olmypic gold
Alice Coachman became the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal when she won the high jump for the U.S. at the 1948 London Olympics. Coachman was often turned away from athletic facilities growing up because of her race and sex and trained where she could. Following her win in the Olympics, Coachman became the first Black woman to endorse an international product when the Coca-Cola Company hired her as a spokesperson and featured her in billboard advertising with Jesse Owens. Coachman has been credited with helping open the door for future U.S. Black women’s track stars such as Evelyn Ashford, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Florence Griffith Joyner.
08/07/1948
Ted Corbitt, “The Father of Distance Running”
Ted Corbitt, the grandson of slaves, was the first Black marathoner named to the U.S. Olympic team, finishing 44th in the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. Corbitt is considered the “Father of Distance Running” in the United States, and for good reason. He ran his first Boston Marathon in 1951, and when he ran his last in 1974 at age 55, his time was only 34 seconds slower than his first race. Corbitt invented many things runners now take for granted, including course measurement and age-group competition. Corbitt’s 1964 book on course measurement set the standards for the sport worldwide and continues to be used today.
07/27/1952
Zheng Fengrong first Chinese woman to hold world record in any sport
Zheng Fengrong becomes the first Chinese woman to hold a world record in any sport when she set the high jump world record of 1.77 meters (5 feet, 9 ¾ inches) in 1957. Zheng never competed in the Olympics as the People’s Republic of China boycotted the Olympics from 1952 to 1984. Zheng’s granddaughter, Ninali Zheng, previously known as Nina Schultz, won a silver medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games for Canada in the heptathlon. But as far back as 2017 she had announced her intentions to compete in the Olympics for her maternal grandparents’ country and live out the Olympic dream her grandmother was unable to fulfill. She was granted Chinese citizenship in April 2021, and finished 10th in the heptathlon at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
11/17/1957
Wilma Rudolph makes history at the 1960 Olympic Games
After making history as the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympics, Rudolph refuses to attend any segregated celebratory events, making her homecoming parade the first integrated event in her hometown of Clarksville, Tenn. In 1963, Rudolph joins other Clarksville citizens in an attempt to integrate a local Shoney’s restaurant. Despite being a hometown and national hero, she’s denied entry because she is Black.
01/01/1960
Otis Davis overcomes racism to become Olympic champion
As a man of Black and Native American heritage, Otis Davis endured racism growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the height of the Jim Crow South. Like many others, he was not able to attend the high school closest to his home because of his race. Davis went on to serve four years in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War before enrolling in college at the University of Oregon. He would then win two gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics, taking the 400 meters in world-record time and two days later anchoring the U.S. 4×400-meter relay team to another gold medal and a world record. Davis was among a group of rising Black athletes who also won their first gold medals during the 1960 Rome Olympics, including Wilma Rudolph and Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay).
09/06/1960
Billy Mills, member of the Sioux tribe, becomes the only American man to win gold in the Olympic 10,000m
Mills, who is also known as Tamakoce Te’Hila and is a member of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe, scores a huge upset, winning gold in the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. His journey to his win almost tragically ends before it begins, as the pain that racism directed toward Mills causes him to consider suicide. He uses the goal of winning the race to help him push through, however, and now Mills advocates for Native American youth through Running Strong for American Indian Youth, which he helps start and becomes the spokesperson for in 1986. Mills also fights for Native American civil and voting rights, spending the vast majority of his time traveling for that cause, and in 2013 he is awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, he second-highest U.S. civilian award. More than 50 years since his historic upset, Mills is still the only American to win the Olympic 10,000 meter.
10/14/1964
Sociologist Harry Edwards creates the Olympic Project for Human Rights to protest against racial segregation in the United States and worldwide
In October 1967, San Jose State University sociologist Harry Edwards founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights to protest racism and racial segregation in the U.S. and beyond. Edwards focused on recruiting athletes participating in the 1968 Olympics to engage in activism there, such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
01/01/1967
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar boycotts the 1968 Summer Olympics over unequal treatment of African-Americans
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar boycotted the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics as a way of protesting the inequalities faced by African-Americans.
10/01/1968
Tommie Smith and John Carlos stand for human rights at the 1968 Olympics
Drawing inspiration from sociologist Harry Edwards, American track & field athletes Carlos and Smith after medaling in the 200-meter dash at the Mexico City Olympics stand atop the podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with bowed heads and their fists in the air, each wearing a black glove. The iconic protest, Smith says, is a “… cry for freedom and for human rights. We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.” The International Olympic Committee bans Carlos and Smith from the Olympic Village for their political message and threatens to ban the entire USA Track & Field team after the US Olympic Committee refuses to send Carlos and Smith home. Eventually, the IOC does expel them from the Mexico City Olympics, and the two return to the United States where they are ostracized from Olympic competition for the next 30 years. The silver medalist, Australian Peter Norman, is the one who gives Carlos and Smith the idea to each wear a glove. Norman, who like Carlos and Smith wears a “Olympic Project for Human Rights” badge on the medal stand, tells them to each wear a single glove after Carlos forgets his at the Olympic Village as an alternative. Norman himself uses his badge as a form of protest for the racist “White Australia” policies at the time. His form of allyship effectively ends his career as he is blackballed from competing for Australia ever again despite running Olympic qualifying times and “suffered to the day he died,” Norman’s son later says.
10/16/1968
Shaul Ladany survives Holocaust and Munich Massacre to compete for Israel in Olympics
Much of Shaul Ladany’s family was killed during the Holocaust, but at age eight, Ladany is liberated from the Bergen-Belson Nazi Concentration Camp in Germany in 1944 with his parents and survives. His family later moves to Israel where Ladany ultimately becomes a top race walker, winning multiple national titles. He represents Israel at the 1972 Munich Olympics and proudly wears a Star of David on his warm-up uniform, meant to show his pride and demonstrate the survival of the Jewish people in the face of Nazi persecution. During the Games, 11 Israeli Olympic members (coaches and athletes) are kidnapped from their living quarters in the Olympic village and murdered by members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization. Ladany escaped the quarters amidst the attack and ran to alert authorities to what was happening. Days later he competes in his event, the 50-kilometer race walk, and finishes in 19th place. Specializing in long-distance walking, Ladany won the 100-kilometer gold medal later that year at the World Race Walking Championships and still holds the unofficial world record in the 50-mile race walk.
09/03/1972
Evelyn Ashford wins multiple gold medals
Evelyn Ashford ended a 16-year gold medal drought for the U.S. in women’s Olympic 100-meter races when she won in Los Angeles at the age of 27 and added a gold medal in the 4x100m relay. Ashford made the 1976 U.S. Olympic team in Montreal as a 19-year-old before enrolling in UCLA where she was the first female track athlete to receive a full-ride scholarship. After having a daughter in 1986, Ashford returned to track and field and won a silver in the 100m in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and another 4x100m relay gold medal. She capped her career at the age of 35 with a gold medal in the 4x100m relay at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Ashford set two 100m world records and held the world record from 1983 to 1988.
08/05/1984
Derartu Tulu and Elana Meyer take victory lap to unite Africa
Derartu Tulu of Ethiopia wins the 10,000 meters at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in a spirited battle with Elana Meyer of South Africa, becoming the first Black African woman to win a gold medal. Tulu and Meyer, who is white, share a hand-in-hand victory lap after the race that many saw as a symbol of hope for a new Africa as apartheid in South Africa was gradually coming to an end. Tulu also won the 10,000m in 2000 at the Sydney Olympics and won the event at the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, after having a daughter in 1998. After finishing third in the 10,000m at the 2004 Olympics, Tulu won the 2009 New York City Marathon at the age of 37. Tulu has been the president of the Ethiopian Athletics Federation since November 2018.
08/07/1992
Plaatjes overcomes apartheid in South Africa, becomes champion marathoner
Mark Plaatjes was born under apartheid rule in South Africa and could not compete in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics because South Africa was banned from competition. Plaatjes, who is Black, applied for political asylum in the United States to provide a better life for his daughter. Plaatjes won the 1991 Los Angeles Marathon and was sixth in the 1993 Boston Marathon to qualify for the U.S. team to the World Athletics Championships, receiving his U.S. citizenship three weeks before the Championships began. In Stuttgart, Germany, Plaatjes used a late surge to win the marathon and remains the only American man to win the event at the World Athletics Championships. Plaatjes has 38 career marathon wins.
08/14/1993
Cathy Freeman first Indigenous Australian to win Olympic Gold
Freeman is the first Indigenous Australian to win an Olympic gold medal when she sped to victory in the 400-meter dash at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Freeman also lit the flame at the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics. She earlier won the 400m at the 1997 and 1999 World Athletics Championships, and was the silver medalist at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. After retiring from competition, Freeman created a foundation to support Indigenous students and was also an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.
09/25/2000
Bryan Clay represents Hawaii, wins Olympic gold
Bryan Clay, who has a Japanese mother and a Black father, is considered the best track and field athlete from the state of Hawaii. He captured the silver medal in the decathlon at the 2004 Athens Olympics before winning the decathlon at the 2005 World Athletics Championships. He wins gold in the event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, joining an extensive line of American decathlete greats to achieve that feet. He later starts the Bryan Clay Foundation to support students in need and provide opportunities they otherwise would not have.
08/21/2008
Sarah Attar opens doors for women athletes in Saudi Arabia
Sarah Attar is the first woman to represent Saudi Arabia in the Olympics when she runs in the heats of the 800 meters at the 2012 London Olympics. Attar was born and raised in the United States but competes for Saudi Arabia as she holds dual citizenship. Attar’s participation prompts Saudi Arabia to create a new women’s division of its national sports federation. Attar also ran the marathon in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. That year, four women athletes, including two track athletes, compete for Saudi Arabia at the Olympics. Qatar and Brunei also send female athletes to the Olympics for the first time in 2012.
08/08/2012
Poverty doesn’t slow down Amos
Nijel Amos shocked almost everyone when, as an 18-year-old at the 2012 London Olympics, he ran 1:41.73 in the 800 meters to win a silver medal behind Kenya’s David Rudisha, who set the still-standing world record of 1:40.91. Only Rudisha and former world record-holder Wilson Kipketer have run faster than Amos, who was raised in poverty in Botswana, orphaned, and then taken care of by his grandmother, whom he credits for this success. Amos, who trains with the Oregon Track Club Elite in Eugene, Oregon, will be among the favorites in the 800m at the 2022 World Athletics Championships.
08/09/2012
Ibtihaj Muhammad wins Bronze Medal at 2016 Summer Olympic Games
Muhammad, a sabre fencer, wins the bronze medal as part of Team USA in the Team Sabre during the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Brazil. She becomes the first female Muslim American athlete to earn a medal at the Olympics and also the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics. Following her historic medal, Muhammad uses her platform to tackle racism and Islamophobia and educate others on making a difference. As a woman athlete who is both Black and Muslim, she’s working to remove the barriers, biases and stereotypes that stood in her way. In a 2018 Yahoo! Sports interview, she said “I can’t sit here as the first Muslim woman to represent the United States at the Olympic Games and be numb on these issues that directly affect me.”
08/13/2016
Yulimar Rojas, staunch LGBTQ+ advocate, dominates the triple jump
Venezuelan LGBTQ athlete Yulimar Rojas has won the women’s triple jump at every major global championship since finishing second in the event at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and she is unbeaten in the event overall since September 2019. She won gold at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and broke her own indoor world record at the 2022 World Athletics Championships with a leap of 15.74m (51 feet, 7 ¾ inches). Rojas won at the outdoor 2017 and 2019 World Athletics Championships. She also is the indoor 2016, 2018 and 2022 World Athletics Championships gold medalist.
08/07/2017
Chand inspires LGBTQ+ community in India
Dutee Chand is India’s national women’s record holder in 100 meters and 4×100 relay. She came out in 2019 as India’s first openly gay athlete after the country’s Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality. Chand competed at the 2017 and 2019 World Athletics Championships, and the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. Chand’s sexuality was a controversial topic among her family, and her sister threatened to out her before Chand publicly announced her sexual orientation. Chand is seen as a role model and hero by many in the gay community in India.
01/01/2019
Gold medalist Kerron Clement comes out
Kerron Clement, a Trinidadian-born American track & field athlete who competes in the 400-meter and 400-meter hurdles, won two Olympic gold medals and five world championships during his career and held an indoor world record in the 400m for nearly 13 years. In 2019, at age 33, Clement announces he is gay at a Nike event in Los Angeles and is considered the first U.S. men’s track star to come out while actively competing. “I was hiding that part because of what society thought,” he said, according to Outsports. “But it’s OK to be that way… Love is love. I have an attraction to men. It’s who I am and it’s what made me become the athlete I am today.”
10/11/2019
Athletes join protests, help lead movement for racial equity
Two months after Louisville police kill Breonna Taylor and less than a month after video showing Ahmaud Arbery’s murder is publicly released, multiple athletes at all levels of sport take part in nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Former Texans coach Bill O’Brien and star player J.J. Watt march in Houston, where Floyd was raised and is eventually laid to rest. The Boston Celtics’ Jaylen Brown drives 15 hours to protest in Atlanta, where the Indiana Pacers’ Malcolm Brogdon speaks about his grandfather marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. NBA stars Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Trae Young also join protests, and Michael Jordan’s Jordan brand announces a 10-year, $100 million donation to organizations fighting racism. Tennis star Coco Gauff, at 16 years old, speaks at a protest in Florida, and college athletes, including the Clemson football team pictured here, lead protests on campus and march through towns. Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad marches in Los Angeles, as does Miami Heat assistant Caron Butler. Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid and more than 100 other NHL players make statements denouncing racial inequality, acknowledging their privilege and pledging to learn and do better. Tyler Seguin protests in Dallas and Zdeno Chara in Boston, while Jonathan Toews meets with activists in Chicago. MLB players such as Aaron Judge, Dexter Fowler, Bryce Harper and C.C. Sabathia speak out through various platforms. Minnesota Timberwolves stars Karl Anthony-Towns and Josh Okogie help lead protests in Minneapolis and in the coming days the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx host a RISE Critical Conversation with the organization, city mayor and law enforcement to discuss next steps.
06/01/2020
Softball players quit team, start new one after GM posts anti-kneeling tweet
Connie May, the team general manager for the Scrap Yard Dawgs, an independent professional softball team in Texas, posted a picture before the game of players standing for the national anthem and celebrated it with a tweet tagging Donald Trump. The coaches and players, many who will represent the U.S. at the 2021 Olympics, felt May used them as political pawns, and as a result they quit the team and started a separate one without May. Kelsey Stewart, one of the handful of Black players on the Scrap Yard Dawgs and Olympic team, said on Twitter, “I AM HURT … I am disgusted … as a BLACK softball player I DO NOT … DO NOT stand with a statement like this … if you didn’t understand racism and what was going on the last month. This … THIS IS IT. This is EXACTLY what we’ve been trying to change.”
06/22/2020
U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee defies IOC rule and ends ban on athlete protests
The International Olympic Committee’s Rule 50 has long banned protests at the Olympics, but it was the U.S. committee that sent track & field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos home from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when the two raised their fists to protest racial injustice during their medal ceremony. Nothing had changed in 2019, when the U.S.O.P.C reprimanded hammer thrower Gwen Berry and fencer Race Imboden for protesting on the medals stand at the Pan American Games. However, in December 2020 the U.S.O.P.C. announced it would no longer punish athletes who participate in peaceful protests, despite the IOC refusing to end Rule 50. The American federation’s decision comes at the recommendation of the athlete-led Team USA Council on Racial and Social Justice.
12/10/2020
Olympic Protests
Athletes from around the world leverage their platforms to protest racism and injustice during the Tokyo Olympics. American shot-putter Raven Saunders and fencer Race Imboden both flash an “X” on the medal stand to represent the “intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.” Hammer thrower Gwen Berry raised her first to protest racial injustice before her event, while members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team kneeled before the start of their opening match for the same cause. So too did women’s soccer players from Great Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Japan. Costa Rican gymnast Luciana Alvarado took a knee and put her first in the air after finishing her floor routine. The International Olympic Committee’s longstanding Rule 50 bars athletes from expressing any form of political or social protest before, during or after competition. But leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, the IOC says it will allow athletes to participate in social activism while on the field of play before their events begin, though still preventing athletes from protesting during competition or while on the medal podium. The following day, the World Players Association union announces it will cover legal fees for any athletes who face punishment for such public demonstrations. On the day of opening ceremony in Tokyo, more than 150 athletes, academics and social justice advocates, including RISE, sign an open letter demanding changes to Rule 50 and urging the IOC to “refrain from imposing sanctions on athletes protesting and demonstrating.” The USOPC had decided in December 2020 not to punish its athletes for on-field demonstrations.
08/01/2021
Saunders wins Silver Medal, protests oppression and racism on Olympic podium
American shot putter Raven Saunders wins a Silver Medal at the Tokyo Olympics and crosses her arms into an X shape on the medal stand to represent “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.” The Black LGBTQ athlete, then 25, has spoken openly about her struggles with mental health, and says she aims to give light to “people all around the world who are fighting and don’t have the platform to speak up for themselves.” Saunders demonstrates on the podium despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rule prohibiting athletes from making such symbolic gestures on the medal podium. Prior to the start of the Tokyo Games, the IOC relaxes its Rule 50, which had banned all such demonstrations throughout the Olympics, allowing athletes to express their views on the field of play before the start of competition but still outlaws demonstrations during medal ceremonies. The IOC chooses not to discipline Saunders for her “X” gesture after her mother passes away days after the event.
08/01/2021