Margaret Matthews Wilburn realized her dream of standing on the Olympic podium wearing a medal around her neck when this world-class track athlete and three of her TSU Tigerbelle teammates captured the bronze medal in the 4 x 100-meter relay during the 1956 Melbourne Games. Wilburn was born and raised in Georgia, where she was an all-state athlete in track and basketball. In 1955 Tennessee State University came calling. She joined the famed Tigerbelles and had an immediate impact on the national and world track scene. She set an American broad-jump record of 19 feet, 9 1/2 inches during the Olympic trials, winning a berth on the 1956 U.S. team. And it was during that Olympiad that she ran second leg on that famed relay team which won the bronze medal and set Olympic and world records that held for almost forty years. In 1957 Wilburn became the first American woman to break the twenty-foot barrier in the broad jump. Later that year in Budapest, Hungary, she won three world championship gold medals in the 100-meter, the 4 x 100-meter relay, and the broad-jump. In 1959 Wilburn won the national broad-jump title for an amazing fourth consecutive year, earned All-American honors for the third time (1957-1959), and brought home a silver medal in the broad-jump competition at the 1959 Pan American Games in Chicago. A remarkable career for a remarkable athlete.
