Irena Szewinska, Champion Polish Sprinter, Is Dead at 72
Irena Szewinska, a sprinter and long jumper who won seven medals in five Olympic Games, tying an Olympic women’s record and becoming a national hero in Poland, died on Friday at a hospital in Warsaw. She was 72.
The cause was cancer, said Henryk Urbas, the press spokesman for the Polish Olympic Committee.
Szewinska’s athletic accomplishments and long run of Olympic appearances led many to consider her one of the greatest Polish athletes of the 20th century. In a tribute on Twitter, President Andrzej Duda of Poland called her “the first lady of Polish sport,” and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called her “an inspiration for generations of Polish athletes.”
A versatile, indefatigable athlete, Szewinska set multiple world records; at one point she had the fastest times in the 100-, 200- and 400-meter sprints. She stood a reedy 5 feet 9 inches tall and had a devastating kick, or last burst of speed, that sometimes let her snatch victory by a stride.
Szewinska (pronounced sha-VEEN-ska) competed in her first Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, when she was 18. She won silver medals in the 200-meter race and the long jump and a gold in the 400-meter relay.
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In later Olympics she won two more gold medals, in the 200-meter race at the Mexico City Games in 1968 and the 400-meter in Montreal in 1976; and two bronzes, in the 100-meter in 1968 and the 200-meter at the Munich Games in 1972.
The only woman to win seven Olympic medals for track and field events before Szewinska was the Australian runner and hurdler Shirley Strickland, who won her medals in three Games beginning in 1948.
The 400-meter finals in Montreal in 1976 was one of Szewinska’s most dramatic races. In the months before, she and the East German sprinter Christina Brehmer had both broken the world record for the 400-meter race, and now they were meeting in Montreal.
Szewinska pulled ahead in the last seconds of the race to beat Brehmer by several meters for the gold medal. She had also set a new world record, 49.28 seconds — one that held until 1978, when the East German runner Marita Koch broke it.
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Szewinska’s next, and last, Olympics were not as exciting. She pulled a muscle at the 1980 Games in Moscow and retired soon after.
Irena Kirszenstein was born on May 24, 1946, to Jakub and Eugenia (Rafalska) Kirszenstein in what was then Leningrad, Russia. After the end of World War II the family returned to Poland and lived in Warsaw, where a teacher first discovered her swiftness at a school competition.
In 1967 she married Janusz Szewinski, a hurdler and coach who later became a sports photographer. She earned a degree in economics from the University of Warsaw in 1970.
In addition to her husband, with whom she lived in Lomianki, outside Warsaw, her survivors include two sons, Andrzej and Jaroslaw, and four grandchildren.
After her competitive career ended, Szewinska worked for different athletic bodies and became an advocate for female athletes. Over the course of her career she was a member of the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations’ women’s committee as well as the president of the Polish Women’s Sport Association.
Szewinska’s Olympic medals and world records were not her only honors. She was a five-time gold medalist at the European Athletics Championships and won more than two dozen times at the Polish Championships.
She was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1981 and the International Association of Athletics Federations’ Hall of Fame in 2012. Four years later she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest award.
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