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Before Stephanie, there was Lillian
Law student, gifted athlete Lillian Copeland was Olympic discus champ in '32
When Stephanie Brown-Trafton stood atop an Olympic podium on Monday and vigorously blinked back tears while holding her gold medal for discus throwing, she became the first U.S. woman to stand there in 76 years.
Since 1932, Lillian Copeland had been the first and only U.S. woman to win gold in the event.
Though Copeland died in 1964 and has since faded from most people's memories, Brown-Trafton, of Galt, followed her footsteps down the Olympic path to gold.
According to several Web sites and books chronicling her past, Copeland excelled in athletics at a time when it was still rare for women to participate in sports.
Copeland played various sports at the University of Southern California. She broke world records ranging from javelin, to a 440-yard relay, and she never lost a track and field competition at USC.
When she won Olympic gold, Copeland was a month shy of age 28, Brown-Trafton's age. Neither woman was first, or even second, in the Olympic trials. But both brown-haired athletes did well enough to get to the worldwide contest, the one that really mattered. For Brown-Trafton, the future is wide open. The 2012 summer Olympics will be held in London, a place certainly worthy of an excuse to travel.
But for Copeland, 1932 was the last time she would go to the Olympics.
Lillian Copeland won gold for the U.S. in the 1932 discus competition. (Courtesy photo)
She boycotted the 1936 games, because the rising Nazi regime refused to let Jews play on the German team. She spent the next 24 years working at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, never again competing in the spotlight after 1935.
Copeland's history is recorded in books and on Web sites that compile lists of Jewish athletes.
Copeland was born in fall 1904, in New York City, to Polish immigrants. Her father died and her mother remarried a man named Abraham Copeland, who moved the family to Los Angeles, according to www.jewsinsports.org and www.sports-reference.com, sites that both have extensive information on athletes.
She attended Los Angeles High School, then majored in sociology and political science at USC. She also found time to compete in tennis, basketball and track and field, according to the book "Their Day in the Sun: Women of the 1932 Olympics," by Doris H. Pieroth.
Her biggest event was the shot put, but it wasn't part of the 1928 Olympics, so Copeland began focusing on discus, according to the book "Great Jews in Sports," by Robert Slater. At age 23, Copeland took silver at the Olympics in Amsterdam.
Despite a busy college course load, she still found time for sports. July 1932 found her on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago for the Olympic trials, according to Pieroth's book.
Like Brown-Trafton, Copeland wasn't a shoe-in for the Olympics: Copeland placed third in discus at the Olympic trials, getting the last spot on the team that would compete in Copeland's backyard.
Copeland was one of three women nominated as captain of the women's track and field team for the 1932 Olympics, but she withdrew so another woman would get the honor, according to Pieroth.
A black and white photo of Copeland shows a woman with wavy, chin-length dark hair, squinting into the sun.
"Copeland was somewhat stoic — a big, strong, stocky woman, not exceptionally tall. A brisk manner accompanied an air of complete self-sufficiency," Pieroth wrote.
That self-sufficiency led Copeland through law school and then to the Sheriff's Department in 1936, where she worked as a juvenile officer for 24 years until 1960.
Little is known of Copeland's life after fading from the Olympic spotlight. In 1935 she played in the second Maccabiah Games, which have traditionally been held the year after the Olympics, except for a 15-year gap during World War II.
Along the way, Copeland was inducted into several sports halls of fame, including the Helms Athletic Hall of Fame and Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel.
In 1994, 30 years after her death in a Los Angeles hospital, she was inducted into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame.
Contact reporter Layla Bohm at layla@lodinews.com.
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T&C wrote on Aug 20, 2008 10:28 AM:
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