Mildred Didrikson Zaharias

Mildred Didrikson
1938
Full name	Mildred Ella Didrikson Zaharias
nation	United States
birthday	June 26, 1911
place of birth	Port Arthur
size	169 cm
Weight	57 kg
date of death	September 27, 1956
Place of death	Galveston
Career
discipline	80-meter hurdles javelin high jump
Medal table
Olympic games 2 × 1 × 0 ×
Olympic games gold Los Angeles 1932 80 m hurdles gold Los Angeles 1932 Javelin throw silver Los Angeles 1932 high jump

Mildred Ella "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias (born June 26, 1911 in Port Arthur , Texas , † September 27, 1956 in Galveston , Texas; born Mildred Didrikson , called Babe Zaharias ) was an American athlete and golfer . She participated in the 1932 Olympics and won two gold medals.

Career

Mildred Didrikson, daughter of a sailor from Norway who emigrated to the United States, competed in eight different disciplines at the American Athletics Championships held on July 4, 1932 in Evanston , Illinois, over a period of three hours. She emerged as the winner of the competition six times.

Didrikson had qualified for all five athletics competitions of the 1932 Olympics. Due to the statutes, she was only allowed to participate in three of them. In any case, the officials viewed the child prodigy, who was unbeatable in throwing and running as a teenager, and who also impressed as a boxer, tennis player, baseball and athletics, with suspicion. Especially her connections to professional sports caused trouble, because Didrikson played on the men's baseball team of the Brooklyn Dodgers , where she was nicknamed "Babe" due to her clout based on the baseball legend Babe Ruth . Due to the restrictions, she decided to throw a javelin (gold medal), 80 meter hurdles (gold medal and world record) and high jump at the games . In the final, however, she jumped just as high as her teammate Jean Shiley with 1.657 m . The jury decided to assign Didrikson only second place due to the jumping style (head first, so-called “ scooter ”). But neither Didrikson nor Shiley were satisfied with that. The two women merged their medals and kept a silver-gold alloy as a trophy.

Didrikson started in addition to athletics and its five other core sports baseball, basketball, billiards, bowling and golf also in fencing, shooting, tennis, horse riding and speed skating.

In search of new challenges, she soon turned to golf. The effort was worth it, because soon she could take on the best golfers in the country. As a professional player, she won the US Open three times . In 1944 she returned her professional license and from then on played as an amateur. She was the first US woman to win the British Ladies Amateur Golf Championship in Gullane, Scotland . In 1947 she was able to win 14 golf tournaments.

Zaharias Museum in Beaumont, Texas

In 1951, Zaharias was among the first female golfers to be inducted into the newly created Hall of Fame of Women's Golf . In 1954, already seriously ill, she won her last US Open. She died in September 1956 of cancer .

Didrikson was first honored with the Associated Press Athlete of the Year award in 1932 . After switching to golf, she received this award four more times. She was posthumously inducted into the IAAF Hall of Fame in 2012.

See also

• List of winners of major golf tournaments (women)

literature

• Babe D. Zaharias: This Life I've Led (Autobiography), ISBN 1-56849-390-8
• Jane Sutcliffe: Babe Didrikson Zaharias: All-Around Athlete. ISBN 1-57505-421-3
• Susan E. Cayleff: Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. ISBN 0-252-01793-5
• The big Olympia Lexicon - Mildred "Babe" Didrikson - Cheated out of gold , sports picture from June 19, 1996, p. 46

Web links

• Mildred Didrikson Zaharias. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).
• Mildred Didrikson Zaharias in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )