Customer Reviews

The Life of Helen Stephens: The Fulton Flash

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Wow, before opening this book I had never heard of Helen Stephens, and now that I've finished Sharon Kinney Hanson's fine book about her life, I feel as though I have known her forever! They called her the Fulton Flash because of her great speed, and her ability to sprint took her out of Missouri and catapulted her to the great stages of the world. Like a comet streaking across the sky she represented the United States in the now legendary Berlin Olympics of 1936, where she appeared in front of Adolf Hitler and, no doubt, gave him a few ruminations about the power and speed of America. The Olympics were actually far from a rout for Germany, as Kinney Hanson reminds us. Nowadays we think that because of Jesse Owens and other great Amerucan performances, that Germany had its ass handed to it at the games, but far from it, they actually did very well and Hitler must have been quite proud! In women's track events, Germany won seven medals, the US only two--both courtesy of Helen Stephens. Conceivably she could have won more medals, but some events later open to women competitors in later Olympics were closed to them in 1936 (like shotput, at which Stephens was a great champ).

Photos show she was an astonishing beauty, with great bones, perhaps a little Amazonian and androgynous. Some people thought she was a man, and this irked her no end. She sued LOOK magazine and the funny comeuppance for LOOK she went out on a date with one of LOOK's lawyers. After several drinks things got hot and heavy. As the author reports, "Helen told her friend Gertrude Webb, 'I had a sense he was trying to find something. So this ole country girl let him roam around awhile 'til he found what he was lookin' for. I just wanted to settle it then and there!"

Nevertheless, Stephens was a lesbian in a homophobic society and stood her ground with dignity and courage. It was hard for such a woman to 'come out' but inevitably she did, or almost did. The whole tragedy of women's sports in the twentieth century is a story that Sharon Kinney Hanson tells with distinction and clarity. She brings all her skills to her on-point account of the apparently intersex sprinter Stella Walsh, killed by a robber's gunfire in 1980, and because of the violent death was subject to an autopsy in Cleveland of all places, which revealed her ambiguous genitalia. Stella Walsh, one of the greatest Olympic heroines, was one of the closest friends of the Fulton Flash, and her death apparently had great impact on Helen. I won't reveal any more of the story, except to say, it is an amazing one, the kind that makes you put down the book and just say, "Holy Moly."