Li Sen

Li Sen was the first female track and field athlete from China to participate in the Olympic Games and one of only two female athletes to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. As a weak and sickly child, she started to exercise Xingyiquan, a Chinese martial art, at the age of nine. Li Sen attended the middle school in Hengyang when she first excelled in track and field, repeatedly winning the sprint events at the school sports meetings. Starting in 1930, she regularly participated in the Hunan Provincial Games setting her first national records in the 200 m and in the long jump. In 1933, Li Sen was “specially recruited” to enter the Daotian Women’s Normal School, where she was trained to become a teacher. Due to her regular training, she was tanned and often called the “dark girl”. After only one year at the Daotian School, she was admitted to the Women’s Physical Education Teacher’s College of Shanghai Southeast University, from where she graduated in 1936.

In 1935, when Li Sen participated in the 6th National Games, she not only won the women’s 50 m, 100 m and 200 m sprint championships and placed second place in the long jump, but also broke three national records. That earned her the name of the “Running Queen” and the year 1935 was proclaimed the “Li Sen Year” by the sports world. She was recommended for the Chinese team at the 1936 Olympics, but because her family was not well off, the trip was sponsored by a Shanghai lawyer. But like most members of the team, Li Sen also suffered from the long journey and the unfamiliar conditions and finished last in her heat.

In the spring of 1937, Li Sen was hired as a sports coach by the Hunan National Martial Arts Center. After internal controversies, she moved to Chengdu to work as a sports teacher at the No. 1 Middle School. One year later, she married a pilot and gave birth to her second child in 1942, but died of postpartum loss of blood at the age of 28.

Personal Best: 100 – 13.7 (1935).