Cheryl Toussaint was on edge ready for the baton within the early heats of the 4×400 meter relay on the 1972 Summer season Olympics in Munich.
She and her teammates had been attempting to qualify for the finals. They appeared like a lock till the “shoe issue.”
“I was the third leg of the relay as I am waiting for the incoming runner to hand the baton to me,” recalled Toussaint, now the 72-year-old meet director of the upcoming forty ninth Colgate Girls’s Video games. “There was a collision. A runner who was on the skin of me fell and dropped the baton.
“I’m wanting backward as a result of my runner is coming in. I have to guarantee that I get that stick. As I get able to take my first few steps, a runner from one other crew crashes into me and steps on the heel on my proper foot inflicting my spike shoe to come back off.
“This isn’t going to remain on. So, I run a number of extra steps. Now a number of different women cross. Solely 4 groups qualify to get to the finals and we’re now in fourth or fifth place and I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’”
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News; Courtesy Cheryl Toussaint
Cheryl Toussaint won a silver medal (inset) at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News; Courtesy Cheryl Toussaint)
Toussaint did what every hard-nosed former Bedford-Stuyvesant native would do. She kicked off the shoe and ran the whole race with only one shoe.
“I was thinking about how silly must I look at the Olympic Games running with one shoe on, but I was also thinking this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I was just running for dear life,” Toussaint said.
She bared down, passed two runners and the team moved on to the finals where she and her teammates — Mable Fergerson, Madeline Manning and Kathy Hammond — captured the silver.
That is a lifetime worth of sporting memories right there, but the NYU grad continues to make more as she oversees the Colgate Women’s Video games with the finals on Saturday, Feb. 1. The finals was once held at Madison Sq. Backyard however have discovered a pleasant area of interest on the Nike Armory in Washington Heights, which can be the house of the Nationwide Observe and Area Corridor of Fame and adjoining to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Munich is just the start for the Erasmus Excessive Faculty grad and a member of the Atoms Observe Membership additionally primarily based in Brooklyn. Each the Atoms and the Colgate Video games had been the brainchild of Toussaint’s predecessor, the late Fred Thompson.
The previous lawyer and assistant New York State lawyer normal, Thompson’s imaginative and prescient is 49 years previous, and it continues with Toussaint on the helm and the whole veteran workers.
“Fred provided an opportunity for me and the folks of the Colgate Women’s Games to extend what had been done for us to others,” Toussaint, who’s been concerned within the Video games for the whole 49-year run, stated. “Most people want to return the favor, pay it forward. The staff, they’ve been involved with this program for well over 25 years.”
Thompson died in 2019, and Toussaint has been the meet director since 2015. Her imaginative and prescient is similar as Thompson’s, to offer younger women and girls an opportunity to reach sports activities, however extra importantly earn scholarships for varsity.
“I was struggling with basics like mathematics and even reading,” Toussaint, a Teaneck, N.J., resident, stated. “There was a point when I joined the [Atoms] track team, I started to understand that this track team wasn’t about just running track.
“You really needed to bring in the grades and put forth the same kind of effort if not more than what you brought to the track in your schoolwork. “
Thompson was an athletic task master
“He took a look at [your] grades. If you’re not doing well, you gotta stay home,” Toussaint, who began operating earlier than the beginning of the Video games as a 12-year-old in borrowed sneakers, stated. She additionally captured a gold medal within the 4×400 on the 1971 Pan Am Video games in Colombia. “I realized if I wanted to stay on this team, I was going to have to cut the mustard. I was going to have to actually bring those grades up.”
She acquired them up a lot in order that she graduated from NYU with a significant in math.
“That had a lot to do with my experience from running just like figuring out everything is mathematical,” she stated.
Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information
Olympic medalist Cheryl Toussaint, Meet Director of the Colgate Girls’s Video games, is pictured on the indoor observe discipline contained in the Fort Washington Avenue Armory in Washington Heights on Jan. 19. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
This yr’s Video games are returning to regular as that is the primary indoor meet since 2020. Two thousand athletes signed up for the Video games and over 1,000 competed.
“In 2020, we ended our indoor series and then the pandemic hit,” she defined. “We didn’t have an [2021] event. In 2022, we opted to do an outdoor event because the pandemic was still lingering and Colgate wanted to be very conservative and safe in terms of exposure.
“We did the outdoor season again in 2023 in the spring. We had to wait until the winter came around for 2024 to return indoors because we are known traditionally as an indoor development series and east coast athletes need this event.
“We start from elementary school, first graders through college and beyond,” she stated.
And there’s a payoff for the ladies.
“In 2022, the scholarship amounts doubled to $2,000 for first place, 1,000 for second and 500 for third,” she stated, “and that’s for every single event and there are 37 events.”
“You have women who are experienced veterans, and you have girls who’ve never run at all,” added Toussaint. “The older ones are encouraging and inspiring the younger ones because they know what it’s like and the younger ones are looking up to the older ones because they want to be there one day.”
“[Young] girls are learning how to compete, how to lead, how to step out and away from their parents and to stand on their own and manage.”
Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information
An athlete competes within the excessive soar on the Armory on Fort Washington Avenue in Manhattan on Jan. 19. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
Observe and discipline has left lasting recollections for Toussaint due to her silver and gold medals, however the tragedy of the bloodbath of the Israeli athletes on the ’72 Olympics is vivid to at the present time.
“When the terrorists attacked, I was literally in the [Olympic] Village where they were,” she recalled in spite of everything these years. “I did see something that looked like athletes being shuffled out of the village. They were shackled. That was probably them.
“The Israeli athletes were being taken from the Village, were in suits, sweat suits as were the terrorists. I kept wondering what I was seeing.”
Getting again to her room was troublesome as a result of the safety was now tighter. Her coach got here to her rescue.
“Fred Thompson was working for ABC with Jim McKay,” she famous because the hostages had been taken earlier than her warmth. “He said, ‘You’ve got to get into the Village.’ We had ID and they let us in.”
Getty; Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information
Olympic medalist Cheryl Toussaint runs at a contest in Toronto in 1973 (left). (Getty; Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
She stayed up hoping to get extra data and the very last thing she remembered was the athletes had been heading to the airport and the native German police had sharpshooters there so nothing would go flawed.
It did.
“We woke up the next morning and I just heard crying and screaming,” she remembered. “Crying because the athletes were killed.”
Perhaps that’s why Toussaint likes the peace of watching previous films and solitude to calm down.
“I just go out and walk to get into my own space by myself and enjoy nature,” she stated.
Whereas the Colgate Video games are a seasonal occasion, it’s a joyful full-time job for Toussaint due to what it means to the members.
“Once they come into the environment and see such positivity, the girls understand that there’s an emphasis with the Games on education by way of the scholarships,” she stated with delight in her voice. “They realize, wait a minute, there’s something more to this. It really does help girls to actually strive to realize their own potential.”
Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information
Cheryl Toussaint, Meet Director of the Colgate Girls’s Video games, poses for a photograph with younger opponents on the Armory in Washington Heights on Jan. 19. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Every day Information)
Toussaint’s potential continues in overdrive for subsequent yr’s fiftieth operating of the Video games instantly after the forty ninth version is a wrap.
“As soon as I finish on February 1st,” she stated with a chuckle, “I’m already planning for that.”
Fred Thompson can be proud.
The forty ninth Colgate Girls’s Video games is a free occasion. To order tickets, go to the web site Eventbrite. Meet outcomes can be posted on https://armortrack.reside/
