27/11/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JWgHmNLtv/
At 4 a.m. on June 25, 1928, Kelley Dolphus Stroud stepped out into the darkness before dawn with a golf club in one hand and a cardboard sign in the other. The sign read "Denver to Olympia." In his pocket, he carried exactly ten dollars. On his back, forty pounds of gear. Ahead of him lay nearly two thousand miles of American highway, and at the end of that road, a chance to run in the Olympic trials.
Stroud was twenty-one years old and already one of the finest distance runners Colorado had ever produced. Three months earlier, he had shattered a twenty-five-year-old record for the fastest round-trip climb of Pikes Peak, completing the punishing ascent and descent in three hours and ten minutes. The mountain had been his training ground since high school, a place where he could run without being told he did not belong.
Because that was what they had told him. When Stroud tried out for his high school football team, they turned him away because of his race. So he found the mountains instead, found the solitude of long-distance running, found something they could not take from him.
In June 1928, he entered the Rocky Mountain regional Olympic trials in Denver. The 5,000-meter race would determine who went to Boston for the national trials, and from there, who would represent America at the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. The organizers promised that winners would receive paid transportation to Boston.
Stroud won.
And then they told him he would not be receiving the promised funds. The excuse they gave was that his time had not matched the previous record. His white coach, L.M. Hunt, protested alongside him. Both men knew what this was really about. The other athletes, all of them white, would ride the bus together to Boston. Stroud would not be joining them.
He could have accepted it. He could have let them take his Olympic dream the same way they had taken his spot on the football team years before. Instead, he made a different choice.
Before sunrise on June 25, Stroud began walking east.
The first hours were the hardest. The roads outside Denver were empty in those early morning hours, and Stroud later recalled walking twenty miles at a stretch without seeing a single car. When vehicles did pass, many did not stop. He walked, and when walking felt too slow, he ran. When exhaustion overtook him, he hitchhiked with whoever would take a young Black man heading east with a golf club and a dream.
He slept wherever he could find shelter. He ate whatever he could afford, which was not much. The ten dollars in his pocket dwindled as the miles accumulated beneath his feet.
As word of his journey spread, a reporter from the Chicago Daily News picked up the story. Suddenly, Stroud was no longer just another hitchhiker on the side of the road. Drivers who had read about him began stopping to offer rides. The story of the runner who refused to quit was becoming something larger than one man's journey.
For twelve days, Stroud moved across America. Through Kansas and Missouri, across the Mississippi, through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio. The landscape changed from prairie to farmland to the green hills of the East. His body grew more exhausted with each passing day. His legs, conditioned for racing, were being used for something no training program had prepared him for.
Somewhere along the way, he passed through a town where his ancestors were buried. He spent a night in that cemetery, surrounded by the graves of family members he had never met, people who had lived and died in a country that was still deciding whether it wanted men who looked like him to succeed. Whatever happened in that darkness, whatever conversations he had with those silent stones, he emerged the next morning ready to continue.
On the twelfth day, Stroud arrived in Boston.
He had covered 1,765 miles. He had walked until his feet bled, run until his lungs burned, accepted rides from strangers who recognized something worth helping in the young man with the desperate eyes and the cardboard sign. He reached Harvard Stadium with exactly six hours to spare before the 5,000-meter trial was scheduled to begin.
Six hours. After twelve days on the road, he had six hours to rest, to eat, to somehow convince his body that it was ready to race against the best runners in America.
The gun fired.
Stroud tried. He pushed himself onto the track alongside athletes who had arrived well-rested, well-fed, transported by the organization that had refused him. For five laps, he ran. His legs, which had carried him across a continent, now struggled to carry him around a track.
On the sixth lap, Kelley Dolphus Stroud collapsed.
His body, pushed beyond every limit that exhaustion and hunger could impose, simply stopped. He could not continue. The race went on without him.
He never made it to Amsterdam. He never got his chance to stand on an Olympic podium. The men who had denied him funding never faced consequences for their decision.
But Stroud was not finished.
He returned to Colorado, to Colorado College, where he became the only Black student on campus until his younger sister Effie joined him the following year. He earned the Perkins Scholarship, given only to students with the highest academic standing. He graduated cm laude in 1931 and became the first African American elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the college.
And he kept running.
Two years after the Olympic trials, Stroud competed in a two-man race in Colorado Springs against Brooks Renshaw, a Finnish runner who had defeated top competitors at those same 1928 Olympics. This time, there was no thousand-mile journey beforehand. This time, Stroud arrived rested and ready.
He won.
Later in life, Stroud earned a Rosenwald Fellowship to study at the University of Mexico, where he completed his master's thesis on African American history. He built a business in Portland, Oregon. He raised children who would carry his story forward, including a daughter named Juanita who still lives in Colorado Springs today.
When asked about his father's legacy, Juanita Stroud Martin speaks of the lessons he taught through his life: independence, perseverance, a love for education, self-confidence, and an unwavering optimism that obstacles could become stepping stones.
Stroud himself maintained a certain humility about his achievements. He once told his children that everyone has a "footlocker," a collection of experiences that shape who they become. He saw life not as a battle against prejudice but as a series of opportunities to develop one's fullest potential.
He died in 1975 at the age of sixty-eight. For decades, his story remained largely unknown outside his family and community.
That is changing now. Colorado College has named a space in their new arena after him. A documentary film called "Running to Harvard" is in production. An opera about his life is being developed. The city he called home, Colorado Springs, now known as Olympic City USA, is finally reckoning with the runner they almost forgot.
In 2021, at the dedication ceremony for the Kelley Dolphus Stroud Club Level at Colorado College, his daughter stood before the crowd and spoke about what the recognition meant.
"This day feels like a great honor," she said. "A validation of the people of my father's generation. They overcame obstacles, discrimination, and prejudice to offer the full extent of their talents to the community and the world."
Kelley Dolphus Stroud never won an Olympic medal. But he won something that no medal can fully capture—the proof that the human spirit, when set against impossible odds, does not always break.
Sometimes, it walks 1,765 miles just to get to the starting line.
