Irena Szewińska biography
Irena Szewińska, née Irena Kirszenstein, (born May 24, 1946, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], Russia, U.S.S.R.—died June 29, 2018, Warsaw, Poland), Polish sprinter who dominated ladies’s athletics for practically twenty years. Between 1964 and 1976, she earned seven Olympic medals, tying the report of Australian Shirley Strickland de la Hunty for many medals received by a lady in Olympic athletics competitors. An distinctive performer in hurdles and the lengthy leap, Szewińska was thought-about to be the best feminine athlete of her technology.
Kirszenstein was born in Russia, though her mother and father had been Polish, and the household returned to Poland when she was nonetheless a toddler. She was 18 years previous when she competed on the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, incomes a gold medal within the 4 × 100-metre relay and silver medals within the 200-metre run and the lengthy leap. In 1967 she married Janusz Szewińska, a sports activities photographer. At the 1968 Games in Mexico City, she received the 200-metre run in world report time (22.5 seconds) and earned a bronze medal within the 100-metre occasion.
The delivery of her son Andrej in 1970 and a extreme ankle harm saved Szewińska from coaching for a yr, however she was in a position to get better in time to attend the 1972 Olympics in Munich. There she took the bronze medal within the 200-metre run. In 1973 her husband turned her coach, and he or she determined to compete in a brand new occasion—the 400-metre dash. The following yr in Warsaw she turned the primary lady to run 400 metres in lower than 50 seconds. At the 1976 Games in Montreal, she received a gold medal within the 400 metres in world report time (49.28 seconds). Her Olympic profession was ended by a muscle pressure on the 1980 Games in Moscow.
Named Poland’s Athlete of 1965, Szewińska additionally earned Woman Athlete of the Year honours from the Soviet information company TASS and plenty of different organizations throughout the Sixties and ’70s. She later served with various athletic organizations, and in 1998 she turned a member of the International Olympic Committee. In 2012 she was among the many first inductees to the International Association of Athletics Federations Hall of Fame.