Only six people in the world have won the 100m dash in back-to-back Olympic Games. The first was Wyomia Tyus in 1964 and 1968. Next was Carl Lewis, then Gail Devers, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Usain Bolt (who won three times in a row), and Elaine Thompson-Herah. To many people, the name Wyomia Tyus is less familiar than the others.
Tyus was not only the first Olympian to win back-to-back gold in its prestige event – she also made history in other ways. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, when Tyus crossed the line first in the 100 meters, she set a world record of 11.08 seconds. And when she ran, she was wearing dark shorts instead of the team-issued white shorts, a gesture to show her support for human rights.
“I was not doing it for any type of glory or anything,” Tyus says. “It was just for me as a person, as a human being, and my feelings and what I thought about what was going on in the world, and how women – Black women especially – were treated.” Tyus grew up in Griffin, Georgia, in the Jim Crow South and became one of the Tigerbelles, a track and field powerhouse coached by Ed Temple at Tennessee State University.
In Mexico City, two days after Tyus’s win in the 100 meters, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists on the podium in what became an iconic image. They were swiftly escorted out of the Olympic Village and sent home for their protest.
Tyus also won gold in the 4×100 meter relay, and she dedicated her win to Carlos and Smith. No one really picked up on Tyus’s own demonstration, and she didn’t talk about why she wore the dark blue (almost black) shorts. “They didn’t care about what I did, because I was a woman and I was Black,” she says.
Leading up to the 1968 Olympics, the Olympic Project for Human Rights discussed ways athletes might demonstrate. But Tyus says she and the Tigerbelles weren’t included in the plans or asked if they were on board. “No one came to us. The whole movement started, and it was more like, ‘Well, this is what we say, and the women are going to follow,’” she says. “I don’t know if those words were spoken, but those are the words I felt.”
So Tyus decided on her own to wear her dark shorts. “I grew up with colored bathrooms, colored water fountains, all those kinds of things. It’s not like I did not know how unfair things were happening to Black people, and especially women,” she says.
Martha Watson, a four-time Olympian between 1964 and 1976, was one of Tyus’s Tigerbelle teammates. She remembers other members of the 1968 US team talking about plans to demonstrate if they made it to the medals stand. “We knew what was going on,” Watson says. “I mean, we lived it. I grew up in California, and I went to school in Tennessee. I could go shopping, but I couldn’t try clothes on in Tennessee. That was a rude awakening for me.”
People who follow track and field know the names of Tommie Smith and John Carlos – as well as Lewis, Devers, Fraser-Pryce, Bolt, and Thompson-Herah. When Lewis won back-to-back gold in the 100 meters in 1984 and 1988, Tyus remembers people celebrating him for being the first, overlooking her achievement two decades earlier.
Why did society skip over her? Maybe people just weren’t paying attention to women’s track in the ‘60s. But that’s not the only reason, Tyus says. “Are they going to give a Black woman that kind of power, to be the first one to do this, ever – in the history of the Olympic Games?” she says. “I mean, I go there with that.”
At the time, women – especially Black women – were expected to “just sit back and be quiet, and don’t say very much,” says Tyus’s Tigerbelle teammate and 1964 Olympian Edith McGuire, who came in second to Tyus in the 100 meters. She also won gold in the 200 meters and silver in the 4×100 relay with Tyus.
At the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, McGuire recalls that the coach of the US men’s team wasn’t going to let the women use the starting blocks designated for the US sprinters. Temple was coaching the women’s team, and he had to fight for them to be able to use the blocks, she says.
Tyus and McGuire were both from Georgia. After the Olympics, they were honored with a parade through Atlanta, but it only went through the Black neighborhoods. Despite being Olympic champions, both were slighted for being Black, for being women, or both.
“To me, Wyomia has still not gotten the due that she should have for winning back-to-back 100 meters in the ‘64 and ‘68 Olympics,” McGuire says. “If she was a man or a white woman, then I think it would have been totally different.”
Even in the history of women’s track, among other Black women, Tyus seems to get overlooked. “When people think of female athletes in track and field, Wilma Rudolph is the only person they remember, or FloJo [Florence Griffith Joyner]. There’s a big void in between,” Watson says. She says part of the reason may be that “Tyus was never really flamboyant–she just went out there and did what she had to do.”
“I am still surprised that she has to blow her own horn,” Watson says. “Skeeter [Rudolph] didn’t have to do that. FloJo didn’t have to do that.”
Tyus grew up on a dairy farm, playing all kinds of sports with her three older brothers, even though girls weren’t really supposed to do that. For girls, “It was a ‘You can go outside and play, but don’t sweat’ kind of thing,” she says. “I wanted to be as good as my brothers, if not better.… In order to play with them and the other boys in the neighborhood, I had to be good. I had to be able to hold my own.”
When she was a teenager, her house burned down, and her father died not long after. Tyus had been close to her father, and after his death, she withdrew and didn’t talk much. That’s when she turned to running track. “I was brokenhearted and depressed, and I was not doing anything. My mom kept saying, ‘You know, your dad would not want this. He would like to see you do something with your life,’” she says. “It was more something to do, and also get my mom off my back.”
One summer, Temple invited her to a track camp at Tennessee State. Before then, she hadn’t realized she was very good at track, because another girl at her high school always beat her, she says. “That summer, the camp pretty much changed my life,” she says. “It changed the way I looked at myself. I thought maybe I could go to college – because my mom could not send me to college.” The opportunities available to Black women were pretty much limited to becoming a teacher or a nurse, she recalls.
Tennessee State gave Tyus a scholarship – a path Temple created for many women who wouldn’t have been able to afford college, Tyus says. Temple’s team consistently developed Olympic champions, including Wilma Rudolph. More than 40 Tigerbelles competed at the Olympics from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, and they won 23 medals. “The whole relay team in 1960 was from Tennessee State,” Tyus points out.
Watson says of the Tigerbelles: “I think it’s probably one of the most special things that’s happened with women in sports, and Black women also.”
Tyus wrote a memoir called Tigerbelle, in part to celebrate what Temple had done for women who otherwise could not have gone to college. “To convince an HBCU to do this for Black women – he never really got the credit for it. All the things he’s done – he gave all of us chances,” Tyus says.
The Tigerbelles were like a sisterhood that has endured through the decades, McGuire says. She and Tyus also developed a close friendship with Temple up until his death in 2016. “He called Wyomia and I the gold dust twins,” McGuire says. Whenever she and Tyus went back to Tennessee State, they’d visit Temple. “We would sit in his living room and talk like three little old biddies.”
Although Tyus’s quiet demonstration in 1968 and historic Olympic wins never garnered much public attention, she still paved the way for today’s athlete activists to demonstrate against injustices.
It’s not that women weren’t speaking out in previous decades, Tyus says. “Nobody was putting the mic in front of their face to let them talk,” she says. “But now, women have a platform, and people are seeing them totally differently. I think Title IX has a lot to do with that, too.”
In recent years, many athletes – particularly Black women – have used their platform to advocate for change. Tyus points to the WNBA. “They were out front before anybody. … They wanted to reach the masses of people to say, ‘Hey, look, this is what’s happening, we need to make a change.’”
In track and field, Gwen Berry and Raven Saunders have advocated for human rights, including racial justice. Berry echoed Carlos and Smith’s protest when she raised her fist on the podium at the 2019 Pan American Games. She was reprimanded and put on probation by the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which has since changed its rules. But the International Olympic Committee still prohibits athletes from raising a fist on the podium.
In some ways, today’s athletes are advocating for the same issues Tyus did in 1968. “The changes are happening, but they may not be happening fast enough,” Tyus says.
“My dad used to say, ‘You always have to stay in the fight,’” Tyus says. “I have tried to maintain that. And I think that all the women, from Gwen Berry on – they are standing for things that will make this a better world in which to live for everybody, not just for one group of people.”
And that fight can take different forms, as Tyus has shown, McGuire says. “You don’t always have to be boisterous,” she says. “No one should say, ‘Well, you didn’t get out there and raise your fist.’ Maybe that’s not my way. My way would be different. Everybody should do whatever they want to do in their own way.”
After the Olympics, Tyus was part of a group of women, along with Billie Jean King, who helped establish the Women’s Sports Foundation. They connected while speaking on the “banquet circuit” about their experiences in sports, Tyus recalls. “Women would come up to you and say, ‘I just wish someone had encouraged me in this, that, and the other. And I would like to have my daughters really be recognized and be in a sport,’” she says.
Supporting that effort was important to Tyus. “Women shouldn’t have to fight for it like this. Women should be encouraged to be in sports. And that was not happening,” she says.
Tyus spent 18 years as a naturalist for the Los Angeles Unified School District, working with kids at a weeklong camp, teaching them about the natural sciences and taking care of the planet. She watched some of them who’d never spent much time outdoors before experience what it was like to be out in nature. You could see them grow in the week they were there, she says. And it took her back to her childhood, when she spent time hiking through the woods with her dad and brothers.
“I know that she’s touched some people. They may not turn out to be an Olympic athlete, but they’ll be an Olympic person” who exemplifies the Olympic creed that the journey is more important than winning, Watson says. “She’s my example of that.”
“She and Wilma, in my eyes, are the greatest, without a doubt,” Watson says. “I’ve known Tyus for over 50 years, and I’ve trained with her. I know that whatever they did on that track came from them. They had no enhancing things to make them run faster. It all came from blood, sweat, and tears on that track, and determination. … And even though she’s not on the Wheaties box, she’s a genuine champion, her heart and her soul.”