Pitt Remembers Woodruff on Historic Anniversary
8/4/2016 12:00:00 AM | Track & Field
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Basking in the glow of a gold-medal performance at those Games was John Woodruff, a 21-year-old African-American middle distance runner from the coal-mining town of Connellsville, Pa. The grandson of slaves, Woodruff won the 800 meters in Berlin Aug. 4, 1936, becoming Pitt's first Olympic Gold Medalist and the first Olympic champion from Western Pennsylvania.
Woodruff passed away on October 30, 2007, at age 92. He was the last surviving gold medalist of the United States’ 1936 Olympic track and field team. He never had the opportunity to defend his title as the 1940 and ‘44 Games were cancelled due to World War II. Because of the social context of his win--as important as it is in sports history--it was a triumph with far larger implications and even more lasting impact.
The Olympic successes of Woodruff and four other gold-medal-winning African-American track and field athletes (including Jesse Owens, who won a then-record four golds) embarrassed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The Führer had boasted that the Berlin Games would showcase German athletic prowess and the superiority of the so-called Aryan race over non-Whites. Woodruff’s gold medal in the 1936 games helped to spike the Nazi myth of Aryan racial superiority.
As a collegian at the University of Pittsburgh, Woodruff would go on to capture six IC4A championships, three NCAA titles and a gold medal at the 1937 Pan American Games. He donated his Olympic gold medal to Pitt, where it is on display in the University's Hillman Library. He was posthumously inducted into the Fayette County Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.