Mae Faggs

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Mae Faggs athletics
Full name Aeriwentha Mae "Toots" Faggs Starr
nation United StatesUnited States United States
birthday April 10, 1932
place of birth Mays Landing , New JerseyUnited States
size 158 cm
Weight 50 kg
job Teacher
date of death January 27, 2000
Place of death Woodlawn , OhioUnited States
Career
discipline sprint
Best performance 10.7 s in a 100 meter run (hand-stopped)
Trainer Sgt.John Brennan, Edward Temple
End of career 1956
Medal table
Olympic games 1 × gold 0 × silver 1 × bronze
Olympic rings Olympic games
gold Helsinki 1952 4 × 100 m
Olympic rings Olympic games
bronze Melbourne 1956 4 × 100 m
last change: August 1, 2019

Aeriwentha Mae "Toots" Faggs Starr (born April 10, 1932 in Mays Landing , New Jersey , † January 27, 2000 in Woodlawn , Ohio ) was an American athlete and Olympic champion . She belonged from 1952 to the Tigerbelles of the Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State College , who were trained by Edward Temple .

The extraordinary athlete had already participated in the XIV Olympic Games in London in 1948 as a 16-year-old , but could not qualify for the final in the 200-meter run . At the XV. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki , she won the team gold medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay race in front of the team from Germany and the team from Great Britain .

At the Pan American Games in 1955, she won gold in the 4-by-100-meter relay and silver in the 200-meter run. At the XVI. At the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne , she won the team bronze medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay race, behind the team from Australia and the team from Great Britain.

In addition, she won eleven national titles, six of them at indoor championships, and was the first American athlete to take part in three Olympic Games .

biography

Mae Faggs grew up with her parents in the ghetto of Newark on. The parents worked in shifts in the shipyards. The father was illiterate, the mother had finished eighth grade. After the grandfather's death, the family left Newark and moved to live with grandmother in Bayside on Long Island .

She came into contact with athletics at the age of thirteen when a patrolman named Dykes visited her elementary school and was looking for children for the Police Athletic League (PAL) to compete for the individual police sections. Faggs, who called herself tomboy (a boyish girl), was a natural and hit guys her age without any training. NYPD Sergeant John Brennan organized those competitions at the time and decided to form an Amateur Athletic Union team to bring together all of the league's talent. Faggs trained three times a week from then on. In 1947, Brennan told her that she could qualify for the Olympic team. A term she couldn't do anything with until her coach mentioned Jesse Owens .

Sergeant Brennan trained the 200 meters with Faggs because she was too mediocre a starter for the 100-meter sprint. Her times developed up to the National Championships in Grand Rapids and the Olympic qualifying race in Providence on Olympic level. Faggs ran into Audrey Patterson of the Tennessee A&I and Nell Jackson of the Tuskegee Tigerettes . She finished the race in third place in the required time and thus won a place on the Olympic team. Her acquaintance with Sergeant Brennan, who was unable to accompany her to London, was helpful with regard to the issue of the passport. Her coach there was Catherine Meyer. The voyage to the 1948 Olympic Games in London took seven days by ship. The women traveled first class and the men second class. Faggs received a check for $ 25 from the PAL for his time in London. Her role models included Babe Didrikson and Tuskegee high jumper Alice Coachman , with whom she would share a room in later competitions. In the London preliminary run, Faggs ran against Fanny Blankers-Koen , but could not qualify for the final as third because no times were recorded in the preliminary runs. She did not take part in the relay.

Faggs, who favored the 200 meters, was beaten at the US Championships and the qualifying race for the 1952 Olympic Games by Catherine Hardy, who in turn could defeat Faggs on the 100 meters. Hardy could not qualify for the sprint finals as she had tougher competitors than US champion Faggs. In their opinion, Hardy could have done better than herself. Mae Faggs, 15-year-old Barbara Jones from Chicago, Janet Moreau and Catherine Hardy caused a huge surprise in the 4 x 100 meter relay . In a dramatic final, the USA defeated the favored teams from Australia, Germany and Great Britain. Faggs handed over the baton in third place, Jones fell back, Janet Moreau ran back to the top four when the Australian runner lost the baton. From a safe third place, Catherine Hardy spectacularly overtook the British and then the German runner coming out of the curve.

Upon her return, Faggs received two war bonds and one hundred dollars from the Kiwanis , with which she traveled to what is now Tennessee State University. She had a choice of four years at Tennessee A&I State College or five years at the Tuskegee Institute, but opted for a scholarship in nearby Tennessee. So she had to work two hours a day in addition to the exhaustive college education and housing training program. Ed Temple, five years his senior, had coached the Tigerbelles in the same year and became something of a big brother for Faggs.

In Tennessee , Faggs was shocked by the visible consequences of racial segregation and the dangers of travel for African Americans in the southern states . You seldom stopped - not even to go to the toilet - and ate from the front of the shop in the kitchen, if the cook was black. Overnight stays were avoided as far as possible and only took place on the campus of an HBCU . Faggs enjoyed the training itself, however, because for the first time she had the feeling that she was receiving the grades she deserved, because at the elitist Bayside High School in Queens she had sometimes been unjustifiably sent to remedial classes. In sport , however, an Olympic dynasty emerged in Nashville . In the sprint, the Tigerbelles mostly took all podium places in the national championships. Under coach Nell Jackson, who became deputy director of the athletics department at Michigan State University in the wake of Title IX in 1973 , Faggs ran in her senior year with Margaret Matthews , Wilma Rudolph and Isabelle Daniels in an all-Tigerbelles relay to bronze at the Olympic Playing in Melbourne in 1956 . However, Faggs was too overtrained to reach the 200-meter final. A fact that she never fully understood.

Following the Games, the Foreign Office sent her on a goodwill tour of Africa. Upon her return, she received an offer from a suburb of Cincinnati through Tennessee State to work as a teacher in Lockland , Ohio . She started teaching exercise and health education / nutrition science in January 1957 . In July 1958, Faggs married Eddie Starr, a teacher she had met in their new home. Their daughter was born in 1964 and a son would soon follow. Faggs also taught children with learning difficulties and received her Masters of Arts from the University of Cincinnati in 1971 . In 1976 Mae Faggs was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame . She retired in 1989 and took a part-time job at Xavier University for two and a half years . She spent her retirement playing golf .

literature

  • Better than the Best. Black Athletes Speak, 1920–2007 , edited by John C. Walter and Malina Iida. Seattle / London, 2010: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-99053-8 (pages 39-57, in English).
  • Carroll van West: The Tennessee State Tigerbelles: Cold Warriors of the Track. in: Separate Games. African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation , edited by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson. Fayetteville, 2016: The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-68226-017-3 (pages 61-71, in English).
  • Kelly Belanger: Invisible Seasons. Title IX and the Fight for Equity in College Sports. Syracuse, 2016: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-3470-6 (in English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Goldstein: Mae Faggs Starr, Champion And Track Mentor, Dies at 67. On: New York Times website; New York City, NY, February 11, 2000. Retrieved July 31, 2019 (in English).