Tyus, Wyomia (1945—)

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Tyus, Wyomia (1945—)

African-American track-and-field sprinter who won three Olympic gold medals. Name variations: Wyomia Tyus Simberg. Born on August 29, 1945, in Griffin, Georgia; youngest of four children and only daughter of Willie Tyus and Marie Tyus; graduated from Tennessee State University; married in 1969; children: daughter Simone (b. 1970).

After excelling in high school track and field, trained at Tennessee State University before competing in her first Olympic Games in Tokyo (1964), where she captured the gold medal in the 100-meter dash and a silver medal in the 4x100-meter relay; in Mexico City Olympics, became the first athlete ever to win two consecutive gold medals in the same event by again winning the 100 meters (1968), also won a third gold in the 4x100-meter relay; won eight National AAU championships; elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame (1980) and the Women's Sports Hall of Fame (1981); inducted into the Olympic Hall of Fame (1985); was a founding member of the Women's Sports Association.

In the early spring of 1999, a small group gathered in Griffin, Georgia, to dedicate a new county park. The guest of honor had come all the way from Los Angeles to attend, for the new park bore her name in remembrance of the distinction Wyomia Tyus had brought to Griffin with her stunning Olympic triumphs in the late 1960s. Back then, when relations between Griffin's white and African-American communities had been more strained, the town had neglected to hold a parade in her honor; and many of Wyomia's contemporaries remembered the time the town had filled the municipal swimming pool with dirt to avoid civil-rights laws that would require whites to share the pool with blacks. Now, 30 years later, Wyomia was finally receiving the recognition she had earned from her hometown.

Born on August 29, 1945, Wyomia Tyus was the only daughter and youngest of four children of Willie and Marie Tyus . Willie, who worked at a dairy farm, took care to instill in his children a realistic view of the challenges they would face as African-Americans, although the state of affairs was clear enough to any child growing up in the South during the 1950s. "The closest school to my house was within walking distance," said Tyus, "but it was whites-only. So each day, I had to ride an hour on a bus to get to school." Willie died in 1960, when Wyomia was just 15, but his warning kept her determination strong in the years that followed.

My father used to tell us, "You will have to work twice as hard to get what you want."
—Wyomia Tyus

Her three older brothers were all good basketball players, and by watching them play and then trying her own skills at the game, Tyus soon found herself on the girls' basketball team at Griffin's Fairmont High School. Track and field came almost as an afterthought, when an alert coach invited her to join the school's sprinting team after watching her on the basketball court. Wyomia's performance as a sprinter was impressive enough to bring an invitation to take part in a summer track-and-field program at Tennessee State University, which awarded her a partial scholarship on her graduation from high school in 1963.

She arrived at TSU at a propitious time for black athletes, for the school had gained a reputation for training some of the first African-American women to compete in international sports, especially in track-and-field competition. Tydia Pickett and Louise Stokes had been the first black women to compete in the Olympics, at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, and were soon followed by TSU-trained Alice Coachman , who won a gold medal in the high jump, and Audrey Patterson , who won a bronze in the 200-meter dash, both at the 1948 Olympics in London. By the time Wyomia arrived at Tennessee State, Dorothy Richey was entering her tenth year as the first African-American director of Olympic track-and-field events for the USOC.

The summer before beginning classes at TSU, Tyus traveled abroad for the first time in her life to take part in an international amateur track-and-field competition in the Soviet Union, in which she won the 100-meter dash and anchored the winning 4x100-meter relay team. Further good fortune followed when she was assigned to TSU's respected track-and-field coach Ed Temple, joining future Olympians Wilma Rudolph and Edith McGuire . It took less than a year for Temple's coaching to show results. By early 1964, Tyus was among the top-ranked runners in the United States for the 100-meter dash; and that summer, she won the event at the National AAU Women's Outdoor Track and Field championships by equaling the world's record. Her victory qualified her, at age 19, for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, where she stunned the world by not only taking the gold medal in the 100-meter dash, setting a new Olympic and a world's record in the process, but by winning a silver medal as part of America's 4x100-meter relay team. Back home, Tyus set a new world's indoor record in the 70-yard dash in Louisville's Mason Dixon Games and came in second in the 100 meters at a Los Angeles meet between United States and Russian runners. She set two more world's records the following year—for the 100-yard dash at a meet in Kingston, Jamaica, and for the 440-yard dash at that year's Mason Dixon Games, where she also set a new indoor record for the event.

She won six more important races during 1966 in 100-meter and 100-yard dashes against American, Russian, and British rivals; and was a member of the 440-yard relay team at the AAU Senior Track and Field championships in Maryland that set a new indoor record. Now 21, Tyus had set four world records and captured Olympic gold and silver medals in just two years of top-level amateur competition. She added a Pan-American Games record in 1967 in her preliminary rounds for the 100 meters, as well as winning two events new to her growing repertoire—the 60-yard dash at the National AAU Indoor championships in Oakland and the 50-yard dash at the 1967 Maple Leaf Games in Toronto.

When Tyus equaled the 1968 world's record for the 100-yard dash at the Ohio AAU Track and Field Meet in Dayton and won the 100- and

200-yard dashes at the Olympic Development meet at Tennessee State, she qualified for her second time Olympics, at the 1968 competition in Mexico City. "I was 23 and people thought I was all washed up," Wyomia said later, but she quickly proved everyone wrong when she raced to a gold medal in the 100-meter dash, becoming the first woman to win two consecutive gold medals in the event, despite the fact that three of her competitors were world-record holders. When she crossed the finish line in a breathtaking 11 seconds, her victory was all the sweeter for setting both a new Olympic and a new world's record for the 100 meters. Two days later, Tyus captured a second gold medal as part of the American 4x100-meter relay team by running the anchor leg of the race in 42.8 seconds, setting yet another world's record. Spectators quickly learned, however, that Wyomia had more on her mind than winning medals. When her American teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos were expelled from the Olympic Village for raising their fists in a show of solidarity with Black Power at the ceremony awarding them their medals, Tyus promptly announced she was dedicating her team gold from the relay to them. Sports had been a way for her to overcome generations of discrimination against blacks in America, and Tyus saw nothing wrong with expressing that sense of accomplishment and solidarity in the context of athletic competition. She made no statements to the press about her feelings; but at the conclusion of the 1968 Games, as her name was placed on the Olympic Committee's All-Time World List for the 100-meter dash, Tyus announced her retirement from amateur competition.

With multimillion-dollar endorsements and entertainment contracts years in the future, Tyus realized little economic security from her five years of competition. "Starting all over, it's kind of difficult saying where you want to go," she said at the time. "You go step by step, waiting and waiting and, I guess, being a sprinter, it's hard to wait." She put the degree in recreational education she received on her graduation from TSU to work in Los Angeles, where she took a job in the city's school system as a physical education coordinator. Although she was instrumental in the formation of the country's first professional track-and-field association and competed in its events during the mid-1970s (remaining, not surprisingly, undefeated), she found more satisfaction in supplementing her teaching by acting as a public relations administrator for track-and-field events and by serving on several track-and-field committees for the U.S. Olympic Committee. The political conscience she expressed at the 1968 Olympic Games was put to use at the Black Studies Center of the University of California and in her service as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United States to Africa. She found the most satisfaction, however, in the position she took in the mid-1990s at an outdoor skills education camp administered by the Los Angeles school system. By the time of her induction into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1985, she had become known for her dedication to instilling a sense of self-confidence and pride in young people. In 1968, she had said little in public about the dedication of her gold medal to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, but she now admits it was an important turning point for her. "What I did was win a track event," Wyomia says. "What they did lasted a lifetime, and life is bigger than sport."