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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > May > 24 > Entry
BLOG: Danica Winning Indy — Greatest Female Sports Feat
If Danica Patrick should win Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, would it be the greatest sporting feat ever accomplished by a female athlete?
Or would that lofty acclaim go to one of the following seven women who I also think belong in that debate?
— Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 at age 19, not only became the first woman ever to swim across the 21-mile English Channel, but she bettered the fastest time of the only five men who’d ever made the crossing — by almost two hours!
— Wilma Rudolph, born a premature four pounds, overcame great poverty and polio that paralyzed her left leg and sprinted to three gold medals — in the 100 and 200 meters and as the anchor of the 400 meter relay team — at the 1960 Olympics .
— Florence Griffith Joyner’s shattering of the world record in the 100 meters at the 1988 Olympic trials — with a time of 10.49 seconds — then following that up with an Olympic-record 10.62 at the Seoul Games, where she also won gold in the 200 with a world-record 21.34. Both of those records still stand. And before she left Korea, she also won a gold medal in the 400-meter relay and took silver in the 1600-meter relay.
— Babe Didrikson won six gold medals and broke four world records at the 1932 AAU national championships, which were the Olympic trials back then.
— In 1976, Shirley Muldowney became the first woman to win a national event in the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Top Fuel division. The next year she became the first woman to win the NHRA points title. By 1982, she’d won three NHRA titles and remains the only person -— male or female — to accomplish that feat.
— Jackie Joyner-Kersee — who won the heptathlon at the 1988 Olympics with a still-standing world record of 7,291 points — repeated her gold medal accomplishment at the 1992 Games, where, five days late,r she also won the long jump with an Olympic record leap.
— The most dramatic victory in the 18 year career of 4-foot-10 jockey Julie Krone — who won 3,456 races and earned $81 million in lifetime purses — came in 1993, when she won the Belmont Stakes aboard longshot Colonial Affair. She remains the only female jock to ever win a Triple Crown race.
While all those are worthy candidates, for me, I pick Patrick.
She not only would be defeating the 32 men in the field — including some of the very best drivers in the world — but she would be winning the most trumpeted auto race in the world and in the process, she would be eclipsing generations of machismo that often have reached the extreme at Indy
Women weren’t even allowed on Gasoline Alley until 1971 and things changed then only because of legal action. Five years later — when Janet Guthrie became the first woman driver at the track — some fans cruelly taunted, yelling for her to crash and burn when she went out to qualify.
And fellow driver Bobby Unser made especially disparaging comments about her to The New York Times back then, saying: “I could take a hitchhiker, give him a Corvette from the showroom and teach him to drive faster than Janet Guthrie.”
Times are different now — though the sexism is still there — and a lot of it has to do with Patrick, who is the most talented female driver ever to tackle Indy. She has three top 10 finishes in the race, led the 500 as a rookie and just last month became the first woman ever to win an IndyCar race when she took the checkered flag at Motegi, Japan.
That victory actually could vie for greatest female sporting feat ever, so I think winning the Indy 500 certainly would deserve that distinction.
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June 9, 2008 2:37 AM | Link to this
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