Betty Robinson, an American athlete who was the first female to win an Olympic gold medal for a track event, has died aged 87. She won the 100 metres in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam just before she was 17 and remains the youngest ever winner of the event.
The 1928 games were the first in which women were allowed to compete in track and field. Baron Pierre de Courbertin, founder of the modern Olympics, regarded their participation as unfeminine, suggesting they should stick to "genteel sports, such as tennis". But after much argument they were admitted to five events - and set world records in all five. Robinson was a high school student in Illinois when her biology teacher saw her running to catch a train. Astounded at her speed, he suggested that they train together. Within weeks she made her racing debut, finishing second to Helen Filkey, the US 100-metres record holder. In her next meeting, she equalled the then world record of 12.0 seconds (Florence Griffiths Joyner's current record stands at 10.49.)
Robinson progressed so rapidly that at 16 she was selected to represent the United States at Olympic level, and the team sailed to Amsterdam working out on a quarter-mile linoleum track laid around the ship's deck. In what was only the fourth competitive race of her life, Robinson ran a world record of 12.2 seconds. "I can remember standing in the middle of the field after the race and seeing the American flag raised, and hearing The Star Spangled Banner and all the people singing it," she said in a 1988 interview. "Then I walked off the field and just kind of enjoyed the feeling."
Robinson was nearly killed when a light plane in which she was travelling crashed near Chicago in 1931. After lengthy rehabilitation, she was eventually able to resume training, although as her ability to come out of the starting blocks was limited, she turned her focus to the relays. She won a second gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a member of the American 4 X 100-metres relay team, after which she retired. She married Richard Schwartz in 1939 and often travelled the country speaking on behalf of the Women's Athletic Association and the Girls' Athletic Association. She is survived by a daughter and three grandchildren.
Betty Robinson Schwartz: born 1911; died 1999