To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We chose 50 of them to re-live, one a day, before new memories are made in Paris. Scroll on for today’s memory.
Caitlyn Jenner, on the back of eye-catching TV commercials, sports commentary, the documentary Keeping up with the Kardashians and her male-to-female transition, has seen her fame sky-rocket.
But what initially made the American famous was a superlative feat on the Olympic stage in 1976 when, during her days as Bruce Jenner, the New York native won gold in Montreal.
Watch the video at the top of the page to see Bruce Jenner win gold in the men’s decathlon at the Montreal 1976 Olympics!
The look was iconic. His blue shorts were short and tight, baring his bulky legs. He wore a bright-red US track and field singlet, exposing his robust arms and shoulders. And he had long, thick hair that flowed in the wind.
Lugging his 188cm, 88kg frame from one discipline to another across two days of competition, Jenner powered to glory in the men’s decathlon and set a new world record.
In the track events, he clocked 10.94 seconds in the 100m, 47.51 seconds in the 400m, four minutes and 12.61 seconds (4:12.61) in the 1500m and 14.84 seconds in the 110m hurdles. In the field events, he recorded 2.03m in the high jump, 4.80m in the pole vault, 15.35m in the shot put, 50.04m in the discus and 68.52m in the javelin. Competing for the final time in his career, he chalked up personal bests in eight of the 10 disciplines, and come the end of the event, he had posted 8634 points to break his own world record.
The triumph posed a deep question.
“I remember getting up the next morning and walking to the bathroom without a stitch of clothes on,” Jenner recalled in a 2019 interview with the BBC.
“The gold medal was sitting there on the table. I put it around my neck, looked in the mirror and asked myself, ‘Am I stuck with this person the rest of my life?'”
Before Jenner became a decathlete, he played football, played basketball and did water skiing.
He turned to decathlon after suffering a knee injury during his time as a US college student, then finished 10th in the event at the Munich 1972 Olympics.
“Did you build up this person so big,” Jenner remembered thinking, “that you’re stuck with him the rest of your life? It was scary.
“People suffering from gender dysphoria [a mismatch between someone’s biological sex and their gender identity] is basically like being born right-handed or left-handed. It’s just who you are. It’s something I didn’t understand, especially growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.”
In 2015, following months of speculation, Jenner came out as a transgender woman via a front cover of Vanity Fair. She appeared in a tight, cream-coloured corset, and quoted across her torso were the words, “Call me Caitlyn”. Going forward, she would be known as Caitlyn Marie Jenner.
In 2017, she underwent cosmetic and sex reassignment procedures.
“I thought, ‘What a great opportunity to change the world’s thinking?’,” Jenner told media publication People in 2020.
“Fifty-one per cent of trans people attempt suicide.
“The murder rate — we’ve been losing one trans woman of colour every two weeks.
“This is my journey. Yes, it is different than other trans people. I get it. But the bottom line is this — when I wake up in the morning, I’m happy with myself.”
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