On the afternoon of August 2, 1928, nine women lined up in the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam for the first women's 800 meters in Olympic history. It was also the first Olympics to hold any track events for women at all. Sweden's Inga Gentzel led through the first lap. With about 300 meters left, Lina Radke of Germany moved to the front and opened a gap down the back straight. Kinue Hitomi of Japan, a sprinter new to the distance, closed on her in the final stretch and finished about two yards behind. Gentzel was third. Two Canadians, Jean Thompson and Bobbie Rosenfeld, were fourth and fifth.
Radke ran 2 minutes 16.8 seconds. That evening the Kitchener Daily Record, in Ontario, reported that she had cut the world record by more than seven seconds, and that the pace had been so fast every one of the first six finished under the old mark. The Associated Press story the next day was much the same: a world record, a German striding to victory, and an American girl who gave every ounce of her strength to finish sixth.
Several of the runners dropped onto the grass inside the track after they crossed the line. By the next morning, that was the story.
The next morning
William Shirer's report for the Chicago Tribune ran under a headline announcing that five women track stars had collapsed. The first five across the line had all gone down, he wrote, which by his count included the winner. He described Florence MacDonald of Boston, whom he placed fifth (she was sixth), falling unconscious onto the grass. Hitomi, he wrote, had come within an inch of winning and needed fifteen minutes to be revived. The American coach Lawson Robertson, watching from the press box, said the event ought to be cut. It was "too much for any woman."
Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, was writing from the Games for American newspapers. Five of the six girls who finished had collapsed, he wrote, and it was "not a very edifying spectacle." A six-day dancing contest, he suggested, would make as much sense as an Olympic event. He added that the English trainer had refused to let his girls run, and the Americans should have done the same. Britain had in fact sent no women's track team at all. Its women's athletic association told the United Press that it had stayed home because five women's events were too few to be worth the trip.
The Montreal Star's cable from Amsterdam called the race a disgrace. All the runners had finished in complete exhaustion, it said, and both Canadians collapsed. The race should come off any future program, because it was:
"obviously beyond women's powers of endurance."
The reports did not agree on how many women had finished, or which ones fell. They agreed on what it meant.
The men on the grass
The next day the men ran their finals in the 400 meters and the 5,000 meters. A long cable printed in the Sun of Auckland, New Zealand, on August 4 described both as thrilling. The American Ray Barbuti won the 400 by about an inch and sprawled full length on the track, exhausted. Paavo Nurmi, beaten in the 5,000, "lay down on the grass for several minutes."
Further down the same column, under a heading announcing that women were not made for races, a London item reported British medical concern about the 800. One specialist explained that nature had made women to bear children, and that a woman could not shed enough fat to be fit for real endurance.
The vote
On August 7, the International Amateur Athletic Federation met in Amsterdam to settle the future of women's track and field. A move to drop women's events entirely failed, 16 to 6. Canada led the side that wanted them gone, the Associated Press noted, even though Canada's women had won the women's competition at these Games. Lady Heath answered the argument that women had never competed at the ancient Olympics by pointing out that the hop, step and jump, fencing and pistol shooting hadn't either. Dr. Bergmann, who examined Berlin's women athletes, argued that ten years of experience showed competition did them no harm.
The 800 meters was voted out, 12 to 9, with one abstention. Six women's events survived, on an American proposal. The longest race left was 100 meters. No woman would run farther than 200 meters at an Olympics again until Rome, in 1960.
Eleven
The number that lasted came almost a year later. In the July 1929 issue of Harper's, the sportswriter John R. Tunis argued that women in sport needed far more medical supervision than men, and offered the Amsterdam 800 as proof. He had stood above the track, he wrote, and watched "eleven wretched women." Five dropped out before the finish and five collapsed after it. The eleventh, he was told later, fainted in the dressing room.
By his count, not one woman in the race walked away. In truth, nine women started the final, with the official report placing eight of them. One researcher who studied the race film could find only eight in the final stretch, so whether all nine runners finished is uncertain. Women had dropped out in Amsterdam, but in the heats the day before, not the final. Tunis's eleven were repeated for decades. Sixty-two years later, a Syracuse newspaper was printing a correction.
Every exhibit in this collection traces the same turn: a woman does something that ought to count in her favor, and it gets recast as the danger. In Amsterdam, women ran the half mile faster than any women had run it before. The men lay on the same grass that week, and it was reported as effort. When the women lay down, it was reported as evidence.
The rules that came out of Amsterdam didn't stop at distance. Four years later, at the Los Angeles Games, no woman could enter more than three events. The rule's best-known test was a Texan named Babe Didrikson.