The greatest athlete ever?

She was born in Texas in 1914. At 16 she led her basketball team to three national titles. At 18, she entered the national athletics' club championships. She won the shot putt, long jump, high jump, baseball throw, hurdles and javelin, setting three new world records, in the space of two and a half hours. She was the only representative of her club, and she beat the second place club (which used 22 athletes) by a clear 8 points. (She still holds the world record in the baseball throw, an event only abandoned in 1957.)

She was only allowed to enter three events in the Olympics that year, so she went for one each of the three main types. Javelin: world record, gold medal; 80m hurdles: world record, gold medal; high jump: world record and first, but she was denied the gold medal for using the Western Roll technique (the Olympic authorities changed their mind later).

After an interval playing pro baseball and basketball (and skipping over her reported excellence at tennis, diving, swimming, bowling, lacrosse, skating and billiards) she took up golf. She became the best in the world, naturally, at one point winning 17 tournaments in a row. When she turned pro, she lost only once in seven years.

How many of you had even heard of this woman? Don't be embarrassed if you haven't, because Chamber's Biographical Dictionary doesn't rate her among the 20,000 people worth covering, and my two sets of encyclopaedias don't mention her. Her autobiography is no longer in print, even in America. I'm inclined to think that if a man (especially a white American, as she was) had a list of achievements anything like that he'd be as famous as Muhammed Ali, say, and would have been the subject of countless biopics (there was one in 1975, starring Susan Clark and Alex Karras, which is hardly the big time).