The Best Female Athletes of All Time

Although I have a great deal of respect for modern female athletes, like Mia Hamm, Serena Williams, or Nastia Liukin, none of them should be called the best female athlete of all time. That honor goes to one of the pioneers in women's sports who rose to the top of the sporting world without the benefit of Title IX and the degree of acceptance that most female athletes today take for granted.

One such woman, arguably the greatest female athlete of all-time, is Mildred ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias. She grew up in a small town in Texas, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. She showed athletic ability very early, reportedly hitting five home runs in one childhood baseball game. She was the star of her high school basketball team and went on to play for a semi-pro company team. She earned All-American honors for three years while leading her team to two National Championships.

At the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) Championship in 1932 she competed in a track and field competition that served as the 1932 Olympic trials. As the sole member of her team she won five of her ten events outright and tied in another, set four world records, and scored eight more points than the second-place team that had twenty-two athletes competing.

At the 1932 Summer Olympics where women were only allowed to compete in three events, she won gold medals in the javelin throw and the 80m hurdles and tied for first in the high jump, but was awarded the silver medal due to a questionable ruling by an official.

She went on to a phenomenal career in golf with 82 tournament victories, including a period in 1946 and 1947 when she won 18 events in a row. She won the 1954 U.S. Women's Open despite having been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. She died two years later leaving behind one of the most impressive athletic records, male or female, of all time. She was an all-around athlete who mastered one sport and then moved on to another and mastered that as well. There are very few men or women who can boast such a wide range of accomplishments in multiple sports.

Another woman who was a female athletic pioneer is Lottie Dod. Born at the end of the Nineteenth Century in Great Britain, she won her first Wimbledon Ladies Championship at age 15 and went on to win it four more times. She is still the youngest woman ever to win that title.

She also excelled in many sports, which at the time were viewed as strictly male endeavors, including mountain climbing, cycling, and curling. In 1995, she did the Cresta Run on a toboggan, which was the precursor to the modern luge and skeleton races.

She won the silver medal for archery at the 1908 Olympics. She played field hockey and golf. The Guiness Book of Records named her, along with Didrikson-Zaharias, the most versatile female athlete of all time.

Two more outstanding female athletes who overcame many obstacles to claim sports greatness were Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolf. In addition to competing during a time when female athletes were still not fully accepted, both of these women also faced the discrimination and racial prejudice that came with being a female black athlete.

Althea Gibson was the first African American to be invited to play at Wimbledon. Although, she did not win that first year she later went on to win two Wimbledon singles titles, two U.S. Open singles titles, and one French Open title, as well as several Grand Slam doubles titles. She won 11 major titles. She was voted the Associated Press Female athlete of the year for two years and like her male counterpart, Jackie Robinson, is credited with helping to break the color barrier in sports.

Wilma Rudolf, a track standout in the mid-twentieth century, endured debilitating illnesses as a child and persevered to become the first American woman to win three gold medals in one Olympics. When she was four years old she contracted a crippling case of polio and wore a leg brace for eight years, yet by age sixteen she was part of the 4 x 100 meter relay team that won the bronze medal at the 1956 Olympics.

She originally played basketball. On her high school team she set several scoring records and led her team to the state championship. She also participated in track during the basketball off-season. She was recruited by the Tennessee State University Track Coach, Edward Temple, and soon shifted her focus to track and field.

At the 1960 Olympics she won three gold medals for the 100m, the 200m, and this time was part of the winning team in the 4 x 100 meter relay team. She retired in 1962 after earning several prestigious sports honors including being named the Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year in 1960 and 1961.

Larissa Latynina was a Soviet gymnast in the fifties and sixties who won her first gold medal at the 1954 World Championship at age 20. Twelve years later at age 30 she was still winning gold medals. She won her last medal, a silver, as part of the Soviet team at the World Championship in 1956.

She still holds the record for the most lifetime Olympic medals, she has an amazing eighteen and nine of them are gold. At the 2012 Olympics Michael Phelps will probably surpass Latynina's record, but she has held it for an incredible forty-five years.

She won fourteen World Championship medals, eight of them gold and fourteen European Championship medals, seven of them gold. She had an incredible career considering she did not compete in a major international event until she was 19.

These and many other women deserve the credit for making women's sports what it is today. Some were competitive champions when women in sports were still seen by some people as unnatural, yet they insisted on developing their talents, competing for their countries and advancing women's athletics. Without their contributions we would have been unlikely to experience and enjoy the great female athletes of today.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Zaharias

http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00014147.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottie_Dod

http://www.altheagibson.com/biographical.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althea_Gibson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilma_Rudolph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Latynina

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps