“Marvelous Mal” Whitfield Stars Over Two Laps

Mal Whitfield of Ohio State didn’t win every time he ran – just enough to earn the nickname “Marvelous Mal.”

Whitfield won back-to-back NCAA 800-meter/880-yard titles in 1948 and 1949, the last of which equaled the 880-yard meet record of 1:50.3 established by Pittsburgh’s John Woodruff in 1937. Whitfield’s first NCAA final came as a freshman in 1946, when he finished second.

In the summer between his NCAA wins, Whitfield remarkably won three medals at the 1948 London Olympics – gold in both the 800 and 4×400 relay, plus bronze in the 400 – and earned the nickname “Marvelous Mal” from his teammates.

While a student at Ohio State (a school recommended to him by Jesse Owens), Whitfield doubled as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, for whom he served after graduating from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles in 1943 and became a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, a segregated group of black military pilots during World War II.

Whitfield was called back into military action shortly after the 1949 season ended. Somehow during the Korean War – among 27 combat missions as a tail gunner with the newly created U.S. Air Force (now integrated) – he managed to train enough to defend his Olympic 800-meter title, winning gold in Helsinki.

“In Korea, he once trained for the Games between bombing missions, running on runways at night with a .45-caliber automatic strapped to his side,” wrote Frank Litsky of the New York Times in Whitfield’s 2015 obituary (He died that year on November 19 at age 91).

Whitfield’s post-competition career saw him spend almost 50 years as a goodwill ambassador of athletics, primarily in Africa. The mayor of Nairobi, Kenya, told Time magazine in 1955 that Whitfield was “something like a Billy Graham of the sports world.” One of Whitfield’s protégés was Kip Keino, a two-time Olympic 1500 gold medalist for Kenya (1968 and 1972), who described him as “the father of organized athletics in Africa.”