2022-02-18
23 分钟Hello, I'm Anu Anand.
Welcome to Outlook, where we travel the world, meeting extraordinary people with life changing stories.
Today we hear from American sprinter Wyomi Taius.
Her story begins in the small town of Griffin, Georgia, in the Southern United States in the days of racial segregation.
But it leads to the top sporting arenas of the world, where she broke records, which are only now, decades later, being given the recognition they deserve.
Wyomie grew up on a farm, and from the very beginning, she was running rings around the boys.
I grew up with three older brothers, and where we lived on a dairy farm, it was in a white neighborhood.
We were the only black family in that neighborhood.
So I grew up playing a lot with boys because I have the three older brothers and the man that owned a dairy farm, he had like four sons and two daughters.
But at this time, you're talking about the 50s and early 60s where there were, you know, white girls were not allowed to play with black children, especially black boys.
So all my playing and being involved in any type of athletics was with my brothers and the white guys.
At that time, girls weren't supposed to play with boys.
Girls had to play with their dolls and learn how to cook and all those kinds of things.
And that was just not my what I was all about.
My dad would always say to my brothers, you know, you just let her play because she's just as good as you, if not better than you.
You should let her play.
What difference does it make?
So, Wyomie, it sounds like right from the beginning, you know, there was this mix of these gender politics, there was race going on at that time in America, but ultimately life on that white dairy farm for you guys as a black family, it sounds like it was also quite idyllic.
Were you aware of the segregation, the racial issues when you were that young?
Oh, absolutely.