Beside her, Helen sensed Ilse Dörffeldt tighten. The German woman pranced in place like an impatient Thoroughbred. Despite the frenetic energy surrounding her, Helen took a deep inhalation and let out a slow exhalation. Though her heart was banging against her rib cage, she felt eerily calm.
It contradicted her every instinct, but Helen turned away from Betty to focus on the finish line. She couldn’t look back, only forward. She needed to trust Betty. Feeling the air around her hum with the power of the crowd’s anticipation, she waited. Please come, please come now, she thought. Her knees trembled.
“Up!”
Betty’s voice rang out above the chaos clearly and there was no time for relief, just action. Helen reached backward, felt the smooth wood of the baton against her palm, and grasped it.
Behind her, a commotion filled the air, a wail of agony.
Helen resisted the urge to look behind her, to see what had happened.
Instead she ran.
LOUISE HELD HER breath as Tidye’s hand clamped around her forearm. On her other side, Mack let out a low whistle of amazement.
They all watched as Helen ran along the final straightaway as if the baton in her hand were a lit stick of dynamite.
She crossed the finish in first place. First place!
But instead of cheering, the stadium fell silent, all attention affixed to the spectacle unfolding in the spot where Marie had handed the baton to Ilse and she had dropped it.
Ilse Dörffeldt had fallen to the track and was now crawling after the baton, still rolling along the cinder. It reached the rim of the outmost lane and stopped. Ilse grasped it, but it was too late. The race was over. The British, Canadians, Italians, and Dutch had all followed Helen over the finish line.
In a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, it felt like everyone was holding their breath.
But then, like a conductor, Helen raised her hands in victory, and it was as if everyone let out a collective exhalation. Yelling and screaming resumed.
Betty, Annette, and Harriet arrived from their different corners of the track and collapsed upon Helen.
Mack nudged Louise and she glanced over to Hitler’s special viewing box. The man had leapt to his feet and stared at the track, his expression aghast. Ilse raised her gaze to look at him and he shook his head, irritated, and smacked his black gloves against his thigh before turning to disappear from his box.
The next few minutes of arranging the top three teams on the medals podium happened quickly. Against a stormy sky, the American flag rose while the opening notes of the national anthem soared over the stands, drowning out the feverish conversations surrounding Louise. Even after all that had happened, the anthem still made her vision swim with tears. Though this country had betrayed her in so many ways, she couldn’t bring herself to reject it. Its promise still had the power to stir something powerful in her.
Betty raised her gold medal to the crowd, her eyes shining with joy and relief. Annette sang and Harriet smiled widely for a photographer crouched in front of them. But out of everyone, it was Helen who mesmerized Louise. For once, Helen was oblivious to the raucous cheering and the cameras and appeared satisfied to simply be surrounded by her teammates, as if that was all she had ever needed.
Over the loudspeaker, the announcer reeled off the standings and final times for each team. The crowd boomed with excitement, but the numbers meant nothing to Louise. It wasn’t the finish line that interested her.
She looked toward the sky where the Olympic flag flapped in the brisk wind. Mack, Jesse, and the men had been setting records and winning medals, and though she was proud of them, a flash of impatience filled her. Beyond the stadium was a whole world filled with girls who had no idea how fast they could run if given the chance. Louise nudged Tidye and bent toward her friend’s ear, yelling to be heard over the din. “Someday they won’t be able to stop us girls.”
Tidye nodded, giving a rueful smile, and wrapped her arm around Louise’s waist.
Afterword
BECAUSE OF WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH, ANOTHER Olympics would not be held until 1948.
What became of these fast girls . . .
Betty Robinson
Settling back into a regular life after the excitement of the Olympics proved to be a little bumpy for Betty. She returned from Chicago and found herself in a whirlwind romance that resulted in a brief marriage, but it was annulled. Soon after, she married a man who had first spotted her in 1931, when she had arrived at a Northwestern football game in a wheelchair while convalescing from her plane crash. From a distance, he had fallen in love with Betty, and he sought her out when she returned home in 1936. Eventually she became a mother of two. She kept her Olympic medals in a Russell Stover candy box, only to break them out to give motivational lectures throughout the Chicago area. Occasionally she would meet for lunch with Jesse Owens and his family.
Betty and her husband moved around the country several times before settling in Colorado. At the age of eighty-four, approximately three years before her death, Betty celebrated the upcoming 1996 Atlanta Olympics by running in the official torch relay through Denver with her family.
She remained close friends with Helen for the rest of her life.
There are historical events that I moved or compressed for the sake of a smooth narrative, and the most significant change that I made was to set Betty’s plane crash in 1932, though it actually occurred a year earlier, in June 1931. Betty’s fiancé, Bill Riel, is a fictional character based on her college boyfriend who was a university football, basketball, and tennis star. Though Betty sold many of her Olympic prizes to pay her way to Berlin, she held on to her medals.
Helen Stephens
Helen’s 1936 Olympic record in the 100-meter sprint remained in place until Wilma Rudolph
