Betty Robinson

Elizabeth Robinson was a schoolgirl in Riverdale, Illinois, in 1928 when a teacher saw her sprinting to catch a train and asked whether she had ever raced. She had not. He timed her in the school corridor, entered her in a meet, and within months she had equalled the world record for 100 metres.

Women's athletics was new to the Olympics that year and there were plenty who thought it should not be there at all. Robinson, 16, went to Amsterdam having run in only a handful of competitive races and won the 100 metres, the first Olympic champion in the event. She added a silver in the relay and came home to a ticker-tape parade in Chicago.

In June 1931 she went up in a small biplane with her cousin. It crashed. The man who found her in the wreckage thought she was dead and took her to an undertaker, where someone noticed she was still breathing. She had a broken leg, a crushed arm and a fractured skull, and was unconscious for seven weeks. It was two years before she could walk normally, and her leg never bent fully again.

That meant she could not crouch in the starting blocks for a sprint. But a relay runner takes the baton standing up. In Berlin in 1936, running the third leg for the United States, she won a second Olympic gold when the German favourites dropped their baton. She lived to 87.