Today's entry is a little black history for you. My great-great uncle, John Woodruff was an Olympic champion during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Well, he passed away this week at the age of 92. Below you can read about him. John Woodruff, whose halting, come-from-behind victory in the 800-meter run in the 1936 Berlin Olympics astonished the sports world and, along with the gold-medal success of Jesse Owens and other black athletes, helped embarrass Adolf Hitler, died Tuesday in Fountain Hills, Ariz. He was 92.  John Woodruff won gold in the 800-meter run in Berlin. The cause was atrial fibrillation and chronic renal failure, his wife, Ruth, said yesterday. Woodruff had earlier lost his legs because of a circulatory ailment. Woodruff was the last survivor of the 12 American men who won track and field gold medals in the 1936 Olympics. Hitler, the German chancellor, had opened the Games confident they would showcase the prowess of German athletes and prove his theories of Aryan racial superiority. He was said to be deeply embarrassed when Owens, Woodruff and three other black athletes came away with eight gold medals. Owens, a sprinter and long jumper, won four. The United States won a total of 24 gold medals in the Games, second only to Germany’s 33. Woodruff’s moment in the 800 final came after he had made a freshman mistake: as other runners began to box him in on the inside, he slowed and briefly stopped. He was a 21-year-old freshman from the University of Pittsburgh with no international experience and was running against veterans like Dr. Phil Edwards, a physician and three-time Canadian Olympian, and Mario Lanzi of Italy, the European champion. After 300 meters, Woodruff recalled, he found himself trapped. “I had to do something,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “I didn’t panic. I just figured if I had only one opportunity to win, this was it. I’ve heard people say that I slowed down or almost stopped. I didn’t almost stop. I stopped, and everyone else ran around me.” That left Woodruff in last place, but also with racing room. With an explosion of sprinting power and a 9-foot stride — he stood 6 feet 3 ¼ inches — he overtook the others in the next 100 yards. Edwards then regained the lead, but Woodruff passed him on the last turn, held off Lanzi by 2 meters and won in 1 minute 52.9 seconds. Arthur Daley, the sports columnist for The Times then, wrote of Woodruff, “He was inexperienced and had more changes of gait and direction than a wild goat going up a mountainside.” John Youie Woodruff was born on July 5, 1915, in Connellsville, Pa. In high school, he drew national attention by running 880 yards (slightly longer than 800 meters) in 1:55.1 twice in one week. In the summer of 1936, he won the United States Eastern Olympic Trials at Harvard Stadium. A week later, in the Amateur Athletic Union national championships in Princeton, N.J., he lost by a foot. A week after that, in the United States Final Olympic Trials at the newly completed Randalls Island Stadium in New York, he beat Ben Eastman, America’s best 800-meter runner, in 1:51.0, after winning his heat in 1:49.9, only a tenth of a second slower than the world record. Woodruff won the A.A.U. 800-meter championship in 1937 and the National Collegiate Athletic Association 880-yard titles from 1937 through 1939. His last race was in the 1940 Compton Invitational in California, where he won the 800 meters in 1:48.6, an American record that lasted 12 years. After college, he became an Army career officer, serving in World War II and Korea and retiring as a lieutenant colonel. In later years, when he lived in Westchester County and central New Jersey, he coached young athletes and officiated at local and Madison Square Garden track meets. A neighbor was Marty Glickman, the sports broadcaster and former runner who was a member of the 1936 Olympic team but never got a chance to compete, having been dropped from the 400 relay because, he maintained, he was a Jew. Glickman knew Woodruff as a dignified, solemn-looking man. “His son and my son played on the same little league football team in New Rochelle, N.Y.,” Glickman, who died in 2001, once said. “I was yelling like crazy, and he was standing there quietly.” In 2003, Woodruff and his wife of 37 years, Rose, moved to an assisted-living facility in Fountain Hills, near Phoenix. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children from a previous marriage: a daughter, Randy Gilliam, of Chicago; and a son, John Jr., of Brooklyn. Five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren also survive him. Woodruff was a member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and a charter member of the Penn Relays Wall of Fame at Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania. “Penn is the most exciting meet I’ve ever run,” he once said. “When I ran there for Pitt, I anchored three relay winners a year for three years.” He added, “It was more thrilling winning at Penn than winning in the Olympics.” | 
