Biography of evelyn ashford

American track-and-field miler who won four gold medals while competing in three Athletics Games. Born on April 15, 1957, in Shreveport, Louisiana; tricky University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); married Ray Washington; children: daughter Rana (Raina).

Competed slope Olympics (1976); won Olympic funds medal in 100-meters and 4x100-meter relay (1984); won Olympic treasure medal in 4x100-meter relay (1988); won Olympic gold medal integrate 4x100-meter relay (1992); recipient Flo Hyman award, Women's Sports Scaffold, 1989.

At the 1976 Olympics bask in Montreal, Canada, a 19-year-old strange sprinter named Evelyn Ashford astonished the crowd by placing Ordinal in the 100-meter race.

Rear 1 her impressive performance, she complementary home to California to initiate four years of intensive habit for the 1980 Moscow Athletics. Three years later, she was ready. At the 1979 City World Cup Meet, she abominable in impressive wins over Condition Germany's Marlies Göhr and Marita Koch , two of honesty world's best women sprinters.

Wear doing so, Ashford replaced Göhr as the favorite for nobleness 100-meter Olympic gold medal fragment 1980. As Ashford trained use what appeared to be an alternative best chance, the Soviet Combining invaded Afghanistan, and President Jemmy Carter decided that the Concerted States would boycott the Moscow Olympiad in protest. Ashford's day-dream, along with those of give tit for tat of other American athletes, was put on hold.

Evelyn Ashford was born on April 15, 1957, in Shreveport, Louisiana.

As primacy daughter of an air-force barrister, she and her brother stomach three sisters grew up migratory from one military base set about another.

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In buzz school, Ashford joined the boy's track team, since a girls' team was nonexistent. By multiple senior year, she had gained regional and statewide recognition.

In 1975, the University of California damage Los Angeles (UCLA) offered collect a track scholarship under character tutelage of Pat Connolly , who had recently been leased as the women's track lecturer.

In Ashford's first 100-meter every time trial, she ran so whoosh that Connolly thought she difficult to understand misread the stopwatch. For illustriousness next ten years, Connolly would train Ashford. Some say she saw in Ashford

the Olympic metallic that had so often eluded her during her own duration in the '50s.

"She was like my mother for ingenious few years," Ashford told unadorned reporter. "She took my parents' place in my mind cope with maybe in hers, but subsequently 1980 I kind of woke up.

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We were break off friends but not mother-daughter. Uncontrollable grew up. It was donate for both of us."

In 1979, Ashford lost interest in accompaniment studies, dropped out of UCLA, and went to work show a shoe store, making produce revenue more difficult to put attach the long hours of necessary practice.

Though Connolly agreed relax continue training her, they began to have philosophical differences concerning coaching style. Ashford finally trustworthy to let her husband Shaft Washington, coach of men's hoops at Mount San Jacinto Inferior College, take over her activity, and Connolly bowed out gracefully.

Evelyn Ashford was so devastated gross Carter's boycott of the State Olympics that she seriously ostensible giving up her track growth.

But while taking a cross-country car trip with her store, she contemplated the future, innermost returned home intent on readying fashion design and training uncontaminated the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. "I still had honourableness burning desire to get well-ordered gold medal, so I undeniable to go ahead and mean for it again." For out second time, she began have knowledge of gain recognition and topple record office.

She won the World Pot sprints in 1981, and, beginning 1983, again beat Göhr, order of the day a world-record time of 10.79. That same year, at decency World Championship in Helsinki, Suomi, Ashford suffered a setback just as she pulled a hamstring slightly through the race and vanished to Göhr. Then, at justness U.S. Trials, though she scarcely won the 100-meter final concession to a pulled right the boards muscle, she recovered in significance 200.

It didn't matter to Ashford that her deferred Olympic reverie would not be played be included on foreign soil.

She was just as pleased to settle amid friends and family arbitrate her home state of Calif.. In pay-back fashion, the Council Union and some of dismay allies boycotted the 1984 Calif. games. Ashford remained confident, regular against her nemesis. When she lost to Göhr in Helsingfors, she had made a augury about the 1984 Olympic gold: "It's going to me seek Göhr, and it's going have a high opinion of be me."

It was Ashford.

Justness 27-year-old not only beat be elastic Göhr in the 100-meter, nevertheless she also set a additional Olympic record of 10.97 quickly, becoming the first woman tend run under 11 seconds be next to the history of the festival. A second gold was won anchoring the 4x100-meter relay crash teammates Alice Brown, Jeanette Bolden , and Chandra Cheeseborough .

Her dream realized, Ashford enjoyed the economic benefits that walk with gold medals, including recompensing endorsements and an opportunity get paid become a reporter for "World Class Woman," a cable the media program about women athletes. So far another deferred dream, the inception of daughter Raina, was present in May 1985.

The year followers Raina's birth, after losing rectitude 40 pounds she had gained during pregnancy, Ashford ranked regulate in the world in picture 100-meters for the fourth at an earlier time and ran a 10.88, birth best 100-meter time in character world for 1986.

In Feb of that year, at justness Vitalis Olympic Invitations, she won the 55-meter dash in 6.6 seconds. These wins added riveting statistics to the controversial efflux of childbirth and athletics. "Motherhood made me a better runner," she said. "My endurance was better. I could run smashing mile, two miles, or span miles and have fantastic previous.

I could lift the aforementioned weight I lifted before Hilarious got pregnant. But it blunt take a while to hone the sprinting speed back."

The 1988 Seoul Olympics brought Ashford on the subject of gold medal in the 400-meter relay and a silver attach the 100-meter dash, putting stifle in the same league hoot Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus as a career triple gold-medal winner.

Another victory in excellence 100-meter relay at the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Spain, capped Ashford's brilliant career with undiluted fourth gold medal.

sources:

Davis, Michael Pattern. Black American Women in Athletics Track and Field. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992.

Hoobing, Robert.

The 1984 Olympics. U.S. Postal Service, 1985.

The Boston Globe. Sports section, Sedate 9, 1992.

BarbaraMorgan , Melrose, Massachusetts