Roy Cochran

Roy Cochran medal table
United States
Olympic games
gold	1948 London	400 m hurdles
gold	1948 London	4 × 400 m

Roy Cochran (actually: Leroy Braxton Cochran ; born January 6, 1919 in Richton , Mississippi , † September 26, 1981 in Gig Harbor , Washington ) was an American athlete and Olympic champion .

Life

Roy Cochran was seventeen years younger than his brother Commodore Cochran , who won Olympic gold in the US 4 by 400 meter relay in 1924 . It was also his brother who brought Roy to athletics and then trained. In 1939, Roy Cochran became champion of the Amateur Athletic Union in the 400-meter hurdles . 1940 Cochran was nominated for the Olympic Games, which were canceled because of the Second World War .

After the USA entered the war , Roy Cochran joined the Navy . In 1942, as a naval lieutenant, he improved the world record over 440 yard hurdles to 52.2 seconds. This performance was weaker than the metric record, but it did show that Cochran was one of the world's best hurdlers during World War II.

After the end of the World War, Cochran prepared for the 1948 Olympic Games . There he first won the 400 meter hurdles in 51.1 s with seven tenths of a margin over second-placed Duncan White from Ceylon. In the relay he then won gold with a four-second lead over the French relay. The main competitor, the team from Jamaica, did not finish because the third runner was injured. And so Roy Cochran won Olympic gold in the same discipline 24 years after his brother.

literature

• Erich Kamper , Bill Mallon : Who's Who of the Olympic Games 1896–1992. Who's Who at the Olympics. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 1992, ISBN 3-928562-47-9 .
• Ekkehard zur Megede: The Modern Olympic Century 1896-1996 Track and Field Athletics. Berlin 1999 (published by the German Society for Athletics Documentation e.V. )

Web links

• Roy Cochran in the database of Sports-Reference (English; archived from the original )