Yahoo Sports Helen Stephens, Olympic Track Star, Paved the Way for Queer Female Athletes
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Helen Stephens was 18 years old when she won two gold medals at the Berlin Olympics and met Adolf Hitler. He “strode forward and gave me a sloppy Nazi salute,” Stephens said in a 1984 oral history interview. “I didn’t return it and I gave him my ‘ole Missouri handshake I always say... . He said I was a pure Aryan type and I should have been running for Germany. I should be a German.’” The German leader also reportedly touched her inappropriately and invited her to spend the weekend at his summer retreat. She declined and found his comment about her being a true Aryan especially humorous since her great-grandmother was “full Cherokee.”
Most 18 year olds would have found Hitler's actions intimidating, but Helen Stephens wasn't most people. Raised on a tenement farm near the town of Fulton, Missouri, the 6-foot-tall Stephens stood out among her peers not only for her height but also for her intelligence, charisma, and athletic ability. She would later tell reporters that she trained for races by running everywhere, racing rabbits for fun, hurdling fences, and hurling cow pies to practice discus throws.
During her decades in public life, Stephens championed women's rights to get an education and to compete as elite athletes. She defied conservative gender stereotypes and struck up romantic relationships with other women, blazing a path for the queer athletes who would come after her.
No track team, no problem
When Stephens attended Fulton High School in the early 1930s in Missouri, there wasn’t a girls’ track team. Before Title IX — the legislation that outlawed sex-based discrimination in schools — passed in 1972, few schools had competitive sports programs for girls. In spite of the lack of a formal competitive team, the boys' track coach noticed Stephens during physical education class. He clocked the 15-year-old sophomore running 50 yards in 5.8 seconds, the world record at the time. Later in her career, Stephens credited that coach, W. Burton Moore, with recognizing her talent and helping her train with the boys at the Westminster College track.
Over the objections of the superintendent of Fulton schools, who told her she'd embarrass herself and the school on the national stage, Stephens made her athletic debut at the 1935 National Amateur Athletic Union's indoor track and field competition at the Arena in St. Louis. The superintendent was right about the event placing the teen runner in the national spotlight, however.
Far from being an embarrassment at the high-profile event, Stephens stole the show by winning the 50-meter dash, the standing broad jump, and the shotput. In the 50-meter dash, she beat the 1932 Olympic champion, Polish American runner Stella Walsh, and tied the national indoor record for the time.
Stella who?
When reporters asked the 17-year-old Stephens how she felt about beating Walsh, she supposedly responded by asking them, "Stella who?" Stephens later admitted she was well aware of Stella Walsh and the significance of beating the Olympian in the race, but she was annoyed with the reporters.
The rivalry between Stephens and Walsh continued to make headlines leading up to the 1936 Olympic games, which would be hosted in Berlin, Germany. Walsh declined to compete against Stephens in other Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) races, although both women lived in the U.S. Walsh ran for Poland because she still retained citizenship in her native country, which paid for her training.
Stephens had her own financial concerns, but businessmen from Fulton drummed up monetary support for the teen and her coach leading up to the Olympic games. She'd later laugh that the superintendent who'd opposed her entrance in the AAU race in St. Louis helped promote her locally and acted as if he'd supported her from the start, exclaiming that "I learned early on that everyone likes a winner."
Let the games begin
Hitler didn’t meet all the athletes, but everyone was aware of him. Stephens acknowledges that while Jesse Owens, her former teammate, was the athletic star of the games, Hitler was “the real star of the ’36 Olympics and there were kings and sports people, movie people, royalty of all kinds in that stadium, but people were not interested in those people…they were interested in Adolf Hitler. Period.”
Helen Stephens and Jesse Owens, American athletes, Berlin Olympics, 1936.
Stephens was spectacularly successful at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, winning two gold medals: one in the 100-meter dash and one as the anchor for the 4 X 100 team. She didn’t just run and win during the Olympic Games, the teen from a small Missouri farming town also took every opportunity to explore Germany.
A Polish friend who was studying at the University of Berlin at the time, invited Stephens to visit her at school. While on campus, the runner was struck by Nazi attitudes toward women. She said they believed women had one duty only, and that was to have as many babies as possible for the fatherland, and they didn’t need a college degree to do that.
Nazis weren’t the only ones who had conservative views on who women were and what they should do. Almost everything about Stephens defied common stereotypes of women at the time. Not only had she always been more interested in physical pursuits than domestic ones, but she was tall, and possessed a deep, masculine-sounding voice.
After she defeated Walsh in the 100-meter dash, Polish journalists accused Stephens of being a man in disguise. German Olympic officials refuted this accusation, saying all athletes had undergone medical inspections that would have revealed this if true. At least one U.S. newspaper contacted Stephen's mother to ask her directly about her daughter's gender. Mrs. Bertie May Stephens told the reporter that her daughter was "absolutely a girl" and added that she didn't like to speculate on what kind of person would "charge that she was anything else." Pennsylvania's Harrisburg Telegraph titled the article "Helen Stephens is Real Girl."
Stephens was a woman who loved women
While we don't know all the details of Stephens' biology or sexuality and she never publicly addressed this topic, we do know that Helen Stephens was a woman who loved women. She left behind letters indicating she was involved in romantic relationships with fellow female students during her undergraduate years at William Woods in Fulton, MO, which she attended on an athletic scholarship. These letters from her girlfriends offer a rare glimpse into how 1930s society felt about same-sex female relationships and how the young women themselves felt about these relationships at the time.
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Many of her college girlfriends went on to marry men and have families. Stephens did not. In the 1950s, she established a relationship with Mabel Robbe, with whom she lived until Robbe's death in 1984. The two never publicly acknowledged their relationship, and their commitment to one another is just a single line in Robbe’s obituary noting their life-long friendship.
Due to her rumored relationships with other women and an article in Look Magazine that questioned Stephens’ gender, the president of William Woods stripped Stephens of her scholarship and forced her to vacate student housing. He said she was an embarrassment to the school.
Look Magazine headlines and cruel accusations didn't deter Stephens. In spite of these setbacks, she paid her tuition while working as a librarian at the school and graduated from William Woods College in 1937. (William Woods was a two-year college at that time.) Eventually, Stephens sued Look Magazine and won $5,500.
The Fulton Flash
Although Stephens won 14 AAU track and field titles and set an Olympic record in the 100-meter dash that stood for 24 years, she had very few opportunities to financially capitalize on her athletic success.
At the age of 19, Stephens retired from amateur sports and turned professional. This early retirement came with the benefit that she could forever boast that she never lost a footrace in amateur sports.
In 1937, she joined Olsen's All-American Red Heads, a professional women's basketball team that traveled the country playing games in barns and gymnasiums. Many of the basketball games included exhibition track meets with Stephens as the star attraction. People paid money to watch the “Fulton Flash” defeat local, often male, track stars.
During this time, she also traveled with the House of David traveling baseball team and even raced in exhibition matches against former 1936 Olympic teammate and fellow gold-medalist, Jesse Owens. The races between the fastest man and fastest woman were tight, although Owens always won but not by more than a few yards at times.
After playing with the Red Heads for about one year, Stephens used the money from her lawsuit to start a team of her own, the Helen Stephens' Olympic Co-Eds. Abe Saperstein, manager of the Harlem Globetrotters, was her mentor. The Co-Eds barnstormed across the U.S. and Canada from 1938 until World War II intervened.
Always a real champion
During World War II, Stephens worked at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant in St. Louis and joined the Marine Corps Reserves. In 1945, she left Curtiss-Wright to work in the Army Audit Branch of the General Accounting Office (GAO) and, in 1950, transferred to the Air Force’s Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center (DMAAC) where she worked as a research librarian until her retirement in 1976.
During this time, Stephens didn't abandon her athletic pursuits. The Co-Eds resumed their tour in 1946 and continued until 1953. During half-time, Stephens often challenged the fastest man in the crowd to race her. She was, after all, the world's fastest woman.
Stephens remained active in the U.S. Olympians Association and worked with Olympic hopefuls. Beginning in the 1950s, Stephens held training clinics for girls interested in competitive track. She advocated for public school athletic programs and was especially outspoken about the importance of athletic programs for girls and women.
In 1976, Stephens returned to her alma mater to work part-time as an assistant coach on the school’s track team. She worked there from 1977-1981 helping to train a group of young women athletes for the school that had once had a team of one, Stephens herself.
Stephens received many honors during her lifetime. Before her death in 1994, Stephens was inducted into the National and United States Track and Field Hall of Fame, The Women's Hall of Fame, and the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.
Shortly after Stephens’ death on January 17, 1994, fellow Senior Olympian Bill Krasner wrote in a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the world knew Helen Stephens was an outstanding athlete, a trailblazer in women’s sports, a down-to-earth, friendly and generous person, and a fierce competitor even in her senior years. He ends the letter by noting that she carried the Senior Olympics torch many times and even carried it the year before her death. He noted that that’s how Stephens would be remembered, she was “a torch bearer, a leader, a real champion.”
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