Alice Coachman, 90, Olympic Gold Medalist

(ATR) Alice Coachman Davis will be remembered as the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

This writerremembers her as a feisty pioneer who once said, "That ain't the half of it, honey, but that's all I'm telling."

Coachman, who died Monday in Albany, Ga. after suffering a stroke in April, won the high jump at the 1948 London Games. She was the last hope for the United States women’s track and field team to capture a gold medal at the first post-World War II Olympics.

Coachman was also the first black woman to endorse an international product, Coca-Cola. She and Jesse Owens appeared on billboards in 1952.

"Traveling up and down the highway, that was all you saw," she said.

Although Coachman’s date of birth is officially listed as November 9, 1923, some of her comments indicated she was born two years earlier. Her children said in 2011 interviews that she was closing in on her 90th birthday.

Coachman paved the way for champions such as Wilma Rudolph, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Allyson Felix, but her trailblazing was often forgotten because she competed before television.

This writer first interviewed Coachman in 1995 in the run-up to the Atlanta Olympics, when she was rediscovered before and during the Games in her home state.

She received many overdue honors, including induction into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 2004. With the 2012 Olympics back in London, interest was renewed in Coachman, one of the last surviving gold medalists.

Growing up in Albany, where an elementary school is named for her, Coachman was a tomboy. She began "jumping with the boys in the street" over rags tied together to form a crossbar.

Coaches at Tuskegee University recruited her to join the track team, but Coachman also had to scrub the swimming pool, knit socks for the football team, and roll the tennis courts "or otherwise you’d be sent home."

She would have competed at both the 1940 and 1944 Olympics had they not been cancelled by World War II.

At the London Games, Coachman and Great Britian's Dorothy Tyler both jumped the same height, an Olympic and American record of 5-feet, 6 1/8 inches. However, Coachman won on fewer misses and received her gold medal from King George VI.

She said Tyler and some of the other jumpers tried to copy her by looking for the flag marking her takeoff point.

"So I moved it back, and they hit the one that I moved back and missed," Coachman said.

When she returned from London in triumph, Coachman met President Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt and Count Basie.She was snubbed, however, by the mayor of her own hometown due to the racial attitudes of the time.

After a motorcade brought Coachman from Atlanta to Albany, the celebration moved into a theater.

"Of course, being segregated, we were on one side and the whites were on the other side of the stage," she said. "The mayor, he didn’t shake my hand, and that was what everybody was talking about - how this woman was coming from England with this gold medal and the mayor didn’t shake her hand.

"I understood where the mayor stood, but to me, just to be home from across the water was fine with me, just to see my mama."

Coachman became a teacher and coach. Her daughter, Evelyn Davis, told me that she and her brother, Richmond, would look at their mother’s scrapbooks with her once a year.

"I think about having to run on dirt and not having shoes and not having clothes and still staying focused enough to accomplish what she accomplished," Evelyn Davis said. "That’s what makes it so great.

"Mama calls it guts."

Written byKaren Rosen

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