Jenner, Bruce (William Bruce)
Track and Field
b. Oct. 28, 1949, Mt. Kisco, NY
Probably no other athlete became more famous or made more money than Jenner by winning a single event. A high school letterman in basketball, football, and track, Jenner was also a three-time Eastern States water ski champion.
He went to Graceland College in Iowa on a football scholarship but a knee injury prevented him from playing after his freshman year. He did play basketball, however, and he discovered the decathlon in 1971. A year later, he qualified for the Olympic team and placed tenth at Munich.
For the next four years, Jenner concentrated on winning a gold medal in 1976 while his wife, Christie, worked as an airline hostess. He won the AAU decathlon in 1974 and 1976 and was the 1975 Pan-American Games champion.
The favorite going into the Montreal Games, Jenner had a virtually unsurpassable lead after the eighth event. Leonid Litvinenko of the Soviet Union congratulated him at that point and then asked, "Bruce, you going to be a millionaire?" Jenner's answer is not recorded, but "Yes" would have been correct. He ran his best time ever in the final event, the 1,500-meter run, to set a world record of 8,618 points. Jenner was named Associated Press athlete of the year and won the Sullivan Award as the nation's best amateur athlete.
Immediately after the Olympics, Jenner began to cash in on his fame. The handsome, 6-2, 195-pounder and the attractive, blue-eyed, blonde Christy were widely promoted as the All-American couple, and they did a number of commercials and public appearances together.
Their divorce in 1980 was almost as widely publicized as Jenner's Olympic victory. The following year, he married Linda Thompson, a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley.