{"id":2139,"date":"2007-12-25T21:06:45","date_gmt":"2007-12-25T21:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2007\/12\/john_woodruff\/"},"modified":"2007-12-25T21:06:45","modified_gmt":"2007-12-25T21:06:45","slug":"john_woodruff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/john_woodruff\/","title":{"rendered":"John Woodruff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/obituaries\/story\/0,,2230737,00.html\">obituary<\/a> about this man the other day, and he&#8217;s someone I&#8217;d never heard of. He was a compatriot of Jesse Owens who ran in 1936 Olympics. Like Owens, he was also black:<br \/>\n<em>John Woodruff, who has died aged 92, was the first black to win gold in Berlin. His triumph in the 800 metres, though overshadowed by Owens&#8217; later feats, was one of the most remarkable in Olympic history. To counter the favourite, Italy&#8217;s European champion Mario Lanzi, Canada&#8217;s Phil Edwards set an exceptionally slow pace. After 300 metres, Woodruff, an inexperienced 21-year-old college freshman, found himself boxed in. So he stopped. After the field had passed, he restarted in the outside lane, and, within 100 metres, took the lead. A gangly 6ft 3ins, with a 10-foot stride, Woodruff was nicknamed Long John, and though Edwards moved ahead on the back straight, Woodruff strode past him on the final turn, then held off a late charge by Lanzi to win in 1min 52.9secs.<\/em><br \/>\nHe died a while ago, but his life is certainly one worth celebrating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read an obituary about this man the other day, and he&#8217;s someone I&#8217;d never heard of. He was a compatriot of Jesse Owens who ran in 1936 Olympics. Like Owens, he was also black: John Woodruff, who has died aged 92, was the first black to win gold in Berlin. His triumph in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}