Richards, Bob

▪ American athlete

byname of  Robert Eugene Richards  

born Feb. 20, 1926, Champaign, Ill., U.S.

 

 American athlete, the first pole-vaulter to win two Olympic gold medals. Sportswriters called him “the Vaulting Vicar” because he was an ordained minister.

      Richards was interested in athletics from boyhood, participating in diving and tumbling before taking up the pole vault in junior high school. He was also a football quarterback in high school. After a difficult adolescence and the breakup of his home by divorce, he was reared by a minister in the Church of the Brethren. He began his higher education in 1944 at Bridgewater College (Virginia), where he played basketball and continued pole vaulting, and then transferred to the University of Illinois, where he received his A.B. degree in 1947. He had become a Brethren minister in 1946 and in 1948 received his M.A. from Illinois.

      Richards won or tied in the pole vault at Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) meets nine times (1948–57). In the same period he also won eight indoor championships. He was the second person ever to pole vault over 15 feet (4.6 m), a feat he accomplished in 1947. At the 1948 Olympic Games in London, he won a bronze medal, and he won his first gold medal at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, repeating this accomplishment at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. He also won decathlon championships in the 1951 and 1954–55 AAU meets. He received the James E. Sullivan award in 1951 for outstanding amateur athlete.

      Richards retired from athletics in 1957 and became a spokesman for Wheaties cereal. He taught sociology at the University of Illinois in the late 1940s and later was a member of the faculty of La Verne College (California; now University of La Verne) as well as holding pulpits in the Church of the Brethren. His autobiography, Heart of a Champion, was published in 1959.

* * *