Dead in 1931, Olympic gold five years later

In June 1931 a man put Betty Robinson in the trunk of his car and drove her to a funeral home in Chicago: he had assumed she was dead after a light-plane crash. An orderly caught a pulse minutes later. Five years after that, in Berlin 1936, Betty won an Olympic gold with the United States 4 × 100 relay team.

Robinson was sixteen and had raced only four times when she ran the 100 metres in Amsterdam 1928, the first Olympics in which women competed in the event. She won gold. Three years later, a cousin took her up in a light plane near Chicago; the aircraft went down in a marsh. She spent seven weeks in a coma and more than six months in a wheelchair. Her left knee locked so badly that she could never crouch into starting blocks again: the sprint start had become physically impossible. She walked in 1932 and ran again in 1935, but only relays, because the runner takes the baton from a standing position, without bending down.

In Berlin, twenty-four years old and with a soldered knee, she ran the third leg. The German team led into the last exchange and dropped the baton. The United States won by half a second. Robinson lived until 1999 and told the story without drama, always with the same line: «a guy thought I was dead, but I wasn't».