Celebrating Women's History Month: Meet Clarksville's Olympians

As we round out Women's History Month, we're taking a look at two Clarksville athletes who changed the name of the game for their respective sports, Wilma Rudolph and Pat Head Summitt.

Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Glodean Rudolph was born on June 23, 1940. She struggled with health complications early in life, including pneumonia and polio, a disease which left her temporarily paralyzed.

Wilma came from a very large family. With help from her mother, Blanche, and her 21 siblings, she was able to regain use of her leg. By age 8, she had to use a leg brace, and custom-made orthopedic shoes for a number of years after that. Her recovery was considered miraculous by doctors of the time.

"My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother," Wilma once said.

At Burt High School, Wilma was the star of the girl's basketball team. She was recruited to Tennessee State University's track and field team and, one year later, joined the U.S. track and field team at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded the bronze medal in the women's 400-meter relay.

Four years later, Wilma took Rome by storm, winning gold in the 100-meter race, the 200-meter race and the 400-meter relay, making history as the first woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Game.

Wilma returned home to Clarksville where a parade was to be held in honor, an event she said she would only attend if it were a biracial, unsegregated event, a first for the city.

Wilma retired from running in 1960, but her story continued. She went on to earn her degree in education from TSU and taught at Cobb Elementary. In 1976, she moved to Indiana with her children where she ran a community center, hosted a local television show and wrote her autobiography.

She passed away on November 12, 1994 at the age of 54.

Pat Head Summitt

Pat Head Summitt was born in 1952 in southern Montgomery County to Richard and Hazel Albright Head, who operated a dairy and tobacco farm.

After finishing their schoolwork and chores, Pat would play basketball in the hayloft with her four brothers.

Pat went on to attend the University of Tennessee at Martin where she played for the Lady Pacers basketball team. As a junior, she traveled to Moscow for the U.S. World University games and won a silver medal.

In the same year, she suffered a knee injury that doctors said would be the end of her basketball career.

After a brief stint as assistant coach, Pat was offered the head coach's position for the University of Tennessee's Lady Vols.

Regarding the job offer, Pat said she was, "absolutely overwhelmed and scared to death." Little did she know that her time in Knoxville would see her became one of the greatest coaches in the game's history.

In 1976, Pat achieved her dream of competing in the Summer Olympics and brought home a silver medal. She returned to the games in 1984, where she led the U.S. Women's Team to the gold medal.

This victory won Pat the honor of being the first Olympian to win medals both as a player and coach.

In her long, 38-season career as a coach, Pat set a record of 1,098 wins to only 208 losses. She saw her teams to eight NCAA National Championships. Fourteen of her players would become Olympians and another 34 would compete in the WNBA.

She has been inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. She is an eight-time winner of SEC Coach of the Year and in 2011 was the Sports Illustrated Sportswoman of the year.

At age 59, Pat was diagnosed with early onset dementia in 2011; however, she finished out the season with a 27-9 record, leading her team to become the 2012 SEC Tournament Champions.

Pat retired from basketball in 2012 and founded the Pat Head Summitt Foundation Fund for finding a cure to Alzheimer's. In that same year, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. She passed away on June 28, 2016 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

A legacy of greatness

Both Wilma Rudolph and Pat Head Summitt left an indelible mark on the world of athletics, but these incredible Olympians' legacies are not limited to the track and to the court.

Wilma Rudolph fought for a more-just world as part of the Civil Rights movement and was a staunch advocate for access to education.

Pat Head Summitt taught a generation of young women that there's no limit to what hard work can achieve, and her foundation has made strides in ridding the world of Alzheimer's.

Both Wilma and Pat fought for a better world, and they certainly helped to create a better Clarksville.

They are both memorialized in the City of Clarksville's Liberty Park, where statues in their likenesses can be found along with plaques containing information about their lives.

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