The great race: John Woodruff’s gold-medal run in ’36 set stage for equality in sports

Halfway home, “Long John” Woodruff made his move.

It wouldn’t be his last.

The young, novice runner raced before 110,000 people packed into Olympiastadion, including those in a special box built for Adolph Hitler. The German chancellor and his Nazi brass believed the Berlin Games — the Hitler Games — would showcase the dominance of the Aryan race on the world stage, even as they tried to exclude athletes who were Jewish or of color.

Woodruff paid no mind.

He stared down the man leading the pack in the 800-meter final in the 1936 Olympics, the last that would be held before World War II engulfed the globe and derailed his athletic career.

The 21-year-old from Connellsville, standing 6-foot-3, towered over the field. His dark skin also made him stand out as one of two Black athletes in the race. He closed in on the other, Canadian middle-distance runner Phil Edwards, and set in behind him.

“I decided I am going to exercise a little strategy — to make sure I won the race by laying back in second position,” Woodruff would later explain. “The plan was to wait until the last 300 meters and start (my) kick.”

Soon, strategy and patience were all but exhausted.

Woodruff had been told to follow Edwards, who was known for his fast start. Instead, the Canadian set a “very, very slow pace.”

Two runners, then a third, pulled up on Woodruff’s right, boxing him in. Each step led him further into a nightmare.

He had to break out. But how? If he forced his way, he would be disqualified.

Pressure forced the drastic, and perhaps his only, shot.

“The only way I could get out of that box was to stop,” Woodruff told the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996.* “So, I stopped.”

Or it surely seemed.

“He didn’t stop completely,” said longtime friend Herbert “Herb” Douglas, who at 99 is the oldest living U.S. Olympic medalist, having won bronze in the long jump at the 1948 London Games. “He says he did, but if you see the film … he really slowed down.”

Regardless, Woodruff faded from second to third from last, as he slowed and watched the rest of the world’s best blur by. It seemed his only chance.

Suddenly, he dug in a left spike, then a right.

“I actually started the race twice,” Woodruff said.

(*Note: All quotes attributed to John Woodruff are from a 1996 oral history interview with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, unless otherwise noted.)

Woodruff’s roots

John Youie Woodruff was born July 5, 1915, in South Connellsville. He arrived nearly 20 years after his family landed in Fayette County and was one of 12 children born to Silas and Sarah Woodruff. Two died young. Johnny was the youngest to survive.

His parents had been born after the Civil War to freed slaves in Virginia. Silas and Sarah wed Oct. 24, 1894. She was 19, he 22, according to marriage records. The bride, born in 1875, was the daughter of Wilson and M. Henry. The groom was the son of Wyatt and Sally Ware Woodruff.

Woodruff ran his first track meet in West Virginia. He did not place.

That was one of only two times in his high school career he failed to win. The other, ironically, came in a meet at the University of Pittsburgh.

Woodruff won the other 14 meets he raced, his coach later recalled, with the youngster setting county, state and national records, including the U.S. high school mile record in 1935.

“I came along very, very fast,” Woodruff said. “I just came into my own.”

A group of Connellsville businessmen who had gone to the University of Pittsburgh hatched a plan.

Woodruff ended up as a member of Pitt’s track team on the school’s Oakland campus.

“That was just unheard of in my family, of going to college,” Woodruff said.

Athletics was his only path to get there.

“I had exactly 25 cents in my pocket when I got to the University of Pittsburgh,” Woodruff said.

Determination

More than half the race was over when Woodruff resolved to float back, moving from second to sixth. Other runners likely thought he had quit.

“I’m boxed in; I can’t do anything about it,” Tyrone Owens, who worked and coached for decades at the school where his cousin’s tree stands, said of what an athlete might think in such a dire situation. “I’ll quit; I’ll accept the place I’m getting.”

But Woodruff had no such inclination. Once space allowed, he shifted to an outside lane and dug in.

“He just ran around all of them like they were standing still,” Douglas said. “He was going to outrun everyone, (even) if he had to double them.”

With a nearly 10-foot stride, Woodruff easily moved from almost last to a fighting chance. He breezed past the pack and again took aim at Edwards.

Woodruff sailed to the front, then Edwards regained the lead. The American pumped his muscular arms and churned his long legs around the bend. On the turn for home, he again forged ahead.

For about nine seconds, Johnny Woodruff finally ran free, bowing his chest and breaking the tape. An Olympic champion.

“Whenever you stop and break a rhythm, that usually finishes you,” he later admitted.

A sports columnist in New York called it “the most daring move ever seen on track.”

Debunking theory

Woodruff said he did not realize the full importance of his victory until it was over. There had been some talk of a boycott, but he had not been a part it.

His focus was not on politics.

“My only objective when I got into a race was to win,” he said.

Winning in Berlin, however, meant everything.

“It was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being a Black man,” Woodruff said. “I was very happy for myself as an individual, for my race, and for my country.”

Of the 18 African Americans who competed, 10 won a total of 14 medals – including eight gold.

“What we did is we destroyed (Hitler’s) master race theory. That made me feel very good,” Woodruff said. “We destroyed his theory whenever we started winning those gold medals.”

The collective success of Black athletes in the ’36 Games made a tremendous impact — both on sports and American society.

“Those African American athletes who won medals in Berlin really had an impact to the degree of showing that African Americans … are some of the greatest athletes in this country,” said Samuel W. Black, director of African American Programs at Pittsburgh’s Senator John Heinz History Center. “This is still 11 years before Jackie Robinson integrates baseball, which basically shatters the ceiling for integration across sports.

“But that 1936 Olympic team really was the foundation for everything we would see in the future of sports in America. There was still a struggle, but you could no longer bar African Americans if they had the talent and if they had the ability to compete.”