For Rudolph, her legacy was simple: showing people that if you don’t give up, you can achieve your dreams. “I would be very sad if I was only remembered as Wilma Rudolph, the great sprinter,” she said in the 1980s. “To me, my legacy is to the youth of America to let them know they can be anything they want to be.” THE LINK: JANUARY 2024 40 EDITOR’S NOTE: In each issue of The Link we will share a story from Alaska’s amazing history of oil, gas and mining. This story was first published by United Press International in 1983. By TONY FAVIA, UPI Sports Writer NEW YORK — It’s a bizarre concept, but try to picture it, anyway. Standing amid the ice floes of the Arctic Circle, with the smell of oil from the nearby fields filling the biting air, a tall, graceful woman breaks the monotony of the sight of teeming pipeline workers. She is there on a mission — not to help with the backbreaking labor that is ongoing, but to help the workers stay in good enough condition to do that labor. She is well-qualified for that job. Wilma Rudolph, 43, the triple-gold medalist from the 1960 Olympics, looks as slim and trim as ever, and she has taken it upon herself to share the secrets of her fitness with the men of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. If you are unfamiliar with the area, Prudhoe Bay is the town at the very top of the Sagavanirktok River on the Beaufort Sea, about as far north as you can get in the U.S. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline begins there on the northern coast. Why does Rudolph make several trips a year to this frozen spot? ‘I’m never reluctant to go anywhere,’ she says. Speaking at a 1983 screening of the television film ‘Champions of American Sport,’ of which she is one, Rudolph said her Wilma Rudolph Foundation, based in her hometown of Indianapolis, was working with Arctic Hosts to provide recreation to the thousands of residents of Prudhoe Bay. And, she said, that gives her a warm feeling. ‘We’ll travel anywhere to help people coordinate their recreation,’ Rudolph says. ‘There’s a certain challenge about going to Alaska, about being the first to do something, and that’s what I like.’ Rudolph, who at 5-foot-11 was exceptionally tall for a female sprinter, was the first to do something in 1960 in Rome, when she stunned the world by running away with three gold medals — the first American woman to accomplish that feat. Now, working with her partner, John Butler, she has about 1,200 pipeline employees running — as well as playing racquetball and basketball. She helped supervise the building of two racquetball courts and an indoor track near the base. ‘We give them all different programs, depending on what they want to do and what we think they can do,’ Rudolph says. ‘We start them slowly if they’re out of shape, maybe just a little jogging at first.’ Ten years before her Olympic triumphs, Rudolph could not do a little jogging, nor even walk easily, as a result of the double pneumonia and scarlet fever she suffered at the age of Wilma Rudolph Aids Pipeliners Snapshot Into Alaska’s Oil and Gas History
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