Where famous track and field athletes grew up and lived

Carl Lewis1963–1979

📍 Willingboro, New Jersey, USA

Carl Lewis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in July 1961, and in 1963, when he was two, his family left the violence of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham for Willingboro, New Jersey…

Cathy Freeman1973–1986

📍 Slade Point, Mackay, QLD 4740, Australia

Cathy Freeman grew up at Slade Point, on the coast at Mackay in tropical North Queensland, the daughter of a Birri Gubba father and a Kuku Yalanji mother. She ran everywhere as a child …

Eliud Kipchoge1984–2001

📍 Kapsisiywa, Nandi County, Kenya

Eliud Kipchoge grew up in the village of Kapsisiywa, in Nandi County in Kenya's highlands, the youngest of four children. His father died when he was very young, and he was raised by his…

Emil Zátopek1922–1937

📍 Kopřivnice, Moravian-Silesian Region, Czech Republic

I was born in September 1922 in Kopřivnice, a small town in the hills of northern Moravia, dominated by the Tatra works, the great factory that built cars and lorries. I was one of the…

Florence Griffith Joyner1959–1977

📍 Jordan Downs, Watts, Los Angeles, CA 90002, USA

I was born Delorez Florence Griffith in Los Angeles in December 1959, the seventh of eleven children. My father, Robert, was an electronics technician, and my mother, Florence, a seamstress…

Jesse Owens1913–1930

📍 Jesse Owens Birthplace, Oakville, Alabama, USA

I was born in Oakville, Alabama in 1913, the seventh of ten children of a sharecropper family, and I grew up in conditions of poverty that most Americans of later generations would find…

Jim Thorpe1917–1923

📍 Jim Thorpe House, 706 East Boston Avenue, Yale, OK 74085, USA

I was born in 1887 in Indian Territory, near Prague in what is now Oklahoma, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation; my Indian name, Wa-Tho-Huk, means Bright Path. I grew up on the prairie…

Mo Farah1992–2001

📍 Isleworth, London Borough of Hounslow, UK

Mo Farah was born in Somaliland in 1983, and in 2022 he revealed in a BBC documentary the truth about how he came to Britain: at about the age of nine, after his father had been killed in…

Peter Snell1938–1949

📍 Opunake, Taranaki, New Zealand

I was born in Opunake, a small town on the Taranaki coast, in December 1938, beneath the great cone of Mount Taranaki and beside the wild beaches of the Tasman Sea. My father was an…

Roger Bannister1929–1939

📍 Harrow, London HA1, UK

I was born in Harrow, on the north-west edge of London, in March 1929. My father, Ralph, was a civil servant, the youngest of eleven children from a poor cotton-weaving family in…

Usain Bolt1986–2004

📍 Sherwood Content, Trelawny, Jamaica

Usain St. Leo Bolt was born in August 1986 in Sherwood Content, a small village in the hills of the parish of Trelawny, in northern Jamaica, and grew up there with his brother, Sadiki, and…

Valerie Adams1984–2002

📍 Māngere, Auckland, New Zealand

Valerie Adams was born in Rotorua in 1984 to Lilika Ngauamo, from Tonga, and Sydney Adams, an Englishman who had many children. Her parents separated when she was small, and she moved with…

Yohan Blake1989–2003

📍 Montego Bay, St. James, Jamaica

Yohan Blake was born in December 1989 in the parish of St. James, in north-western Jamaica, around Montego Bay, the sixth of seven children of Shirley and Veda Blake. The family lived in a…