Bob Richards

Bob Richards
Full name	Robert Eugene Richards
nation	United States
birthday	February 20, 1926
place of birth	Champaign
size	178 cm
Weight	75 kg
Career
discipline	Pole vault
Best performance	4.72 m
society	Los Angeles Athletic Club
status	resigned
Medal table
Olympic games 2 × 0 × 1 × Pan American Games 2 × 0 × 0 ×
Olympic games bronze London 1948 Pole vault gold Helsinki 1952 Pole vault gold Melbourne 1956 Pole vault  Pan American Games gold Buenos Aires 1951 Pole vault gold Mexico City 1955 Pole vault

Robert Eugene "Bob" Richards (born February 20, 1926 in Champaign , Illinois ) is a former American athlete and Olympic champion .

Richards, nicknamed "the vaulting vicar," lived in California when he qualified in the pole vault for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Four years earlier, when he was still a student, he had won the bronze medal at the 1948 Olympic Games in London. In Helsinki there was even a gold medal with a jump of 4.55 meters. He was able to repeat this success four years later in Melbourne in 1956 . Richards is the only pole vaulter to have won Olympic gold twice and also the only pole vaulter to have won three Olympic medals in this discipline. In 1956 he also took part in the decathlon , but gave up after the ninth discipline.

His 1959 book The Heart of a Champion was a bestseller in the United States and considered a "bible" by coaches and athletes.

In 1983, Richards was inducted into the US Olympian Hall of Fame.

In 1984, Richards was a presidential candidate for the racist populist party around the Holocaust denier Willis Carto , and in 2010 Richards supported the racist American Third Position party .

Fonts

• Pole Vault - That uplifting feeling . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1952 ( online ).
• The Heart of a Champion. Revell, Westwood, NJ 1959; New edition for the 50th anniversary of publication: Revell, Grand Rapids, MI 2009, ISBN 978-0800732721 .
  • A winner's heart. From the American by Helga Fernbacher. Bahn, Konstanz 1971, ISBN 3-7621-4401-X .

Web links

• Literature by and about Bob Richards in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bob Richards in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ olympianranch.com
2. ↑ Larry Keller, Former Wheaties Spokesman Said to Back Racist Party , Southern Poverty Law Center, July 15, 2010