Mildred McDaniel

Mildred McDaniel ( Mildred Louise "Millie" McDaniel ; married singleton ; born November 3, 1933 in Atlanta , Georgia , † October 5, 2004 in Pasadena , California ) was an American high jumper and Olympic champion .

Mildred McDaniel was born the youngest of three children to Victoria and Claude McDaniel. She only got into the sport when her PE teacher at David T. Howard High School in Atlanta promised each girl in the school a new pair of shoes that could convert ten free throws with basketball . When she did that and then joined the school's basketball team, her enthusiasm for the sport grew and she became one of the team's mainstays. There she got her nickname Tex.

At the urging of the high school athletic trainer Marian Armstrong-Perkins, under whose training three athletes had already matured into Olympians, McDaniel also appeared for an athletic training session . When she commented on another girl's jump by saying the girl couldn't jump, her trainer challenged her to do better. The long jump , hurdles and relay races were later added to the high jump . While still a student in high school, McDaniel won two Georgia state championship titles in basketball and multiple titles in the 80-yard hurdles, high jump, and long jump.

After graduating from high school, McDaniel moved to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1952 . Under the training of Cleve Abbott , she became the best high jumper in the USA. In 1953, 1955 and 1956 she was American champion. In addition, she won two other national titles in the hall in 1955 and 1956.

McDaniel was also successful on the international stage. At the Pan American Games in Mexico City in 1955 , McDaniel won the high jump competition in front of the Brazilian Deyse de Castro with a height of 1.68 meters .

However, she celebrated her greatest success at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. In the Olympic final on December 1, 1956, she prevailed against the favored Iolanda Balas from Romania and Thelma Hopkins from Great Britain, both of whom had jumped world records in the run-up to the Olympic Games, and became Olympic champion. When their victory was already certain, McDaniel had the bar set on the new world record height of 1.76 meters. In the second attempt, she mastered this height.

After completing her training as a physical education teacher , McDaniel ended her active career in 1957. In 1958 she married Louis Singleton and moved with him to California, where she worked for 32 years. In 1983 she was inducted into the United States' Hall of Fame for Athletes. Mildred Singleton died on 5 October 2004 at the age of 70 years in a convalescent home to cancer .

literature

• Peter Matthews (Ed.): Athletics 2005. SportsBooks, Cheltenham 2005, ISBN 1-899807-27-6 .

Web links

• Mildred McDaniel (b.1933) in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, May 20, 2003
• McDaniel-Singleton, 1956 Olympic High Jump gold medalist dies ( memento from October 20, 2004 in the Internet Archive ), obituary on the IAAF website, October 7, 2004
• Mildred McDaniel in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )