Wilma Rudolph was born premature, the 20th of 22 children, and as a little girl she battled pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, which left her with a weak leg and a brace. Because of segregation she couldn’t get treatment at the local hospital, so every week she and her mother rode a bus 100 miles round trip to Nashville. At home her family massaged her leg four times a day. By age nine she was walking without the brace. “My doctor told me I would never walk again,” she once said. “My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” In 1960 in Rome she won three Olympic gold medals, the first American woman to do that at a single Games, and cemented her status as the fastest woman in the world.
