She excelled at so many sports one writer said that it was easier to summarize her athletic achievements by saying she wasn’t good at swimming.
She led basketball, softball and hockey teams to championships.
Trophies from tennis, the discus, hurdles, shot put and javelin were all on her shelves along with a gold and silver medal from the 1928 Summer Olympics.
When it was time to choose the greatest Canadian female athlete in 1950, she was the overwhelming choice.
Her name is so synonymous with excellence that each year Canada’s top female athletes are awarded with a trophy named in her honour.
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx!
Today, I share the story of one of the most dominant athletes in history.
Bobbie Rosenfeld!
Fanny Rosenfeld’s journey to greatness began on Dec. 28, 1904.
Born in the present-day Ukraine, she never knew her homeland.
As an infant, her father Max and mother Sarah left what was then part of the Russian Empire for a new life in Barrie, Ontario.
They faced persecution in Russia for being Jewish and hoped for a better life half a world away.
She had an older brother named Maurice and soon after the family immigrated it grew.
Gertrude was born in May 1906 and a third daughter, Mary, followed a year later in November 1907.
Then fourth and final child, Ethel, was born fifteen years after Fanny, in 1919.
When they arrived in Canada her father opened a shop in their new home. From the street side, he sold antiques, and from the alley he purchased unwanted items.
It was a successful enough endeavour that the Rosenfelds could be considered lower middle-class.
Bobbie’s upbringing was pleasant enough but by the time she was nine years old she would take her first big step towards greatness.
Bobbie and her sister Gertie would be attending a fair.
They were to take lunch with them but amid the excitement of the day, they lost their food.
As luck would have it, a 50-yard dash race would be happening during their visit.
The prize was boxed lunches for first, second and third.
Her other sister Ethel said,
“Bobbie took my sister Gertie, and they entered the race. Bobbie won and dragged my sister across, so she came in second and they had two box lunches.”
It would be the first of many she would go on to win… but I don’t want to get ahead of myself because racing wasn’t her only sport. As a teen Bobbie also tried her hand at basketball, lacrosse, tennis, hockey and softball.
She dominated in all of them.
During this time, she also earned the nickname that became more well known than her birth name.
Bobbie
The name came after she cut her hair into a bob,
The chin-length haircut symbolized the new freedoms and cultural shifts for women and was particularly associated and popular with flappers.
Her friends began calling Fanny… Bobbie and the nickname stuck.
From then on very few people ever called her Fanny.
By 1922, Bobbie had won every athletic competition she entered.
In Barrie she was a big fish in a small pond, but as luck would have it that year she would be moving to Toronto.
Some would think that a bigger city would offer Bobbie a challenge.
They would be wrong.
She was a force that would be unmatched. Bobbie joined the Young Women’s Christian Association hockey team in March 1922.
The team played on outdoor rinks and sometimes temperatures would dip as low as -30 Celsius.
At that temperature, everything froze, including the puck.
Bobbie told legendary sportscaster Foster Hewitt years later,
“I shot the puck, and it hit the goalpost, and the doggone puck splintered in about 29,000 pieces.”
She says Bobbie’s dominance on the ice was in part thanks to early skills she learned in Barrie.
When she wasn’t on the ice, she was on the court with the Young Women’s Hebrew Association’s basketball team and helped the team win the city and provincial championship.
They moved on to the national championship but lost to the Edmonton Grads.
They were arguably the greatest basketball team ever assembled.
You can hear all about the legendary Grads in my episode from 2023 I’ll put the link in the show notes.
Bobbie’s prowess in sports would continue after high school.
Once she graduated, she went to work as a stenographer at Patterson Chocolate Factory.
The company sponsored several sports teams for female employees and Bobbie joined all of them.
She captained the hockey team, and they became the top women’s team in the province.
In the summer she played shortstop for the Hinde & Dauch team in the Sunnyside Ladies’ Fastball League and took them to a championship.
Bobbie was also an accomplished lacrosse player, golfer, speed skater, and tennis player.
She even won the Toronto Ladies’ Grass Courts Tennis Championship in 1924
But her greatest achievements, however, came on the track and it all started by a chance.
In the summer of 1923, at a sporting carnival near Barrie, Bobbie Rosenfeld was playing an exhibition softball game and after the game, there was a 100-yard race Her teammates said she should enter, and Bobbie decided to give it a shot.
She not only won the race but came within a hair of setting a world record.
Oh, and who did she beat that day?
None other than Canada’s the top female sprinter.
Rosa Grosse.
Bobbie impressed Rosa Grosse, and everyone else that day and so she began to train with the sprinter.
Bobbie joined Rosa as well as fellow runners Myrtle Cook and Grace Conacher in practices leading up to a historic race taking place on Sep. 8, 1923.
The four runners would be taking part in an athletic day at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.
And it would be the first time that women were allowed to take part in the competition.
Bobbie won the 100-yard race.
Then, Bobbie, Rosa, Myrtle and Grace teamed up to defeat the Chicago Flyers in the relay.
While the American team was sponsored and had the money for matching running shorts and fancy shirts, Bobbie ran while wearing her brother’s shorts, her father’s socks and her softball jersey.
After the race, she looked up and saw her father, who had taken time away from work, sitting on the stadium fence banging on a piece of wood.
The cheering crowd could never drown out her dad, and she heard him yell,
“That’s my girl! Fannie!”
It would be a busy day of Bobbie,
Because that night she helped her softball team win the city championship just a few steps away at Sunnyside Park.
Meanwhile, that CNE race she had won earlier in the day?
Well, it became an annual tradition for Bobbie and Rosa Grosse to go head-to-head.
Bobbie may have won the first year but then in 1924 Rosa emerged as the victor only to lose the next year to Bobbie as she set a world record.
1925 was also the first year Ontario also allowed women to compete in its first track and field championship.
And one woman won in the shot put, discus, 220-yard dash, long jump and low hurdles.
That incredible athlete was none other than Bobbie Rosenfeld.
And if winning wasn’t enough, she also set a world record in the 220-yard dash.
She was the only representative from her athletic club, but she earned enough points at the track meet that she single-handedly won her club the championship as well.
Constance Hennessey with the Toronto Ladies Athletic Club said,
“Not big, perhaps five-foot-five. She didn’t look powerful, but she was wiry and quick. Above all she was aggressive, very aggressive physically. No, I don’t mean that she made a lot of noise or had a belligerent manner. She simply went after everything with full force.”
Bobbie was an incredible athlete, she had proven her dominance in Canada, and soon she set her sights on the Olympic stage.
The Modern Summer Olympics began in 1896 in Athens, Greece as a way to promote international understanding through sporting competition.
Only 14 nations took part that year and most of the athletes were from Greece.
Despite issues, the event was judged to be a massive success and slowly the Olympics grew.
In the 1900 Paris Olympics women were allowed to take part for the first time.
They competed in five sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf.
Paris was also the first Summer Games for Canada, and two runners represented the country.
George Orton and Ronald MacDonald. Orton did us proud by winning a gold and bronze medal.
For the next 25 years, Canada sent an increasing number of athletes to the Olympics, but they were all men.
In 1928 the Olympics allowed women to compete in athletics for the first time at the Summer Games in.
Since Pierre de Coubertin created the modern Olympics in 1896, women were not allowed to compete in track and field because he believed.
women were simply too frail for Athletics.
He said in 1912 that women in Athletics were quote,
“Impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper”
Others claimed athletics would damage a woman’s health and reproductive capabilities.
But on July 11, 1928, Bobbie Rosenfeld stood on the SS Albertic.
As she crossed the Atlantic, she was ready to prove the world wrong in Amsterdam.
She had been selected to the 1928 Olympic team, and as great as that honour was.
She didn’t know that by the time she returned home, she would be a Canadian hero.
Bobbie Rosenfeld was one of seven women in Canada’s Olympic contingent.
Jean Thompson, Ethel Smith, Myrtle Cook, Ethel Catherwood and Jane Bell, and Bobbie would all be competing in athletics.
The seventh athlete was Dorothy Prior, a swimmer.
Ssh didn’t win a medal, so she is often overshadowed by what became known as The Matchless Six who not only proved women could compete at the Olympic level… they dominated track and field.
Ethel Catherwood won gold in the high jump.
She was the last Canadian woman to win an Olympic gold in a field event until 2024 when Camryn Rogers won in the hammer throw.
Bobbie was supposed to compete in the discus, but the event was scheduled on the same day as the 100-metre race, so she chose to run instead.
The race began with several false starts, and Myrtle Cook was disqualified.
The race finally got off to a good start with American Betty Robinson in the lead.
At around 50 meters Bobbie caught up with her and by the time they crossed the finish line they were neck and neck.
Without the advent of a photo finish to determine the winner it was up to a judging panel who couldn’t decide who crossed the finish line first, but they awarded the gold to Robinson with a hand-timed world record of 12.2 and the silver to Bobbie with a time of 12.3
The Canadian team protested but were denied and Bobbie was joined on the podium by fellow Canadian.
Ethel Smith, who won bronze.
The next event Bobbie entered; she had no intention of winning.
She was there for her friend and teammate Jean Thompson.
Team Canada manager Alexandrine Gibb said,
“In the annals of women’s athletics, there is no finer deed than this.”
Bobbie may have not won a medal that day, but she still had another chance with the Women’s 4 x 100 metre relay.
She was going to run in a team made up of Ethel Smith, Myrtle Cook, and Jane Bellin the first heat, the Canadian foursome finished with a time of 49.3 seconds and set a world record.
In the final, they broke it and set a new one of 48.4 seconds beating the favoured American team by .4 seconds to capture the gold medal.
Katie Fisher, Digital Assets and Exhibits Manager for Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame says that the Matchless Six were some of the women breaking ground in sports at that time.
When they returned to Toronto, they were greeted like conquering sports heroes.
She may have reached the pinnacle of the sporting world in 1928, but as soon as she returned to Toronto, Bobbie got back in the game so to speak. A series of exhibition races were arranged, and the first one took place in her former hometown of Barrie.
“When I arrived…the officials were most apologetic. No girl racers had answered the challenge, but would I run against the boys? I did and won with the help of a three-yard handicap.”
But her body had been failing her since the Olympics.
On the way home from Amsterdam, she noticed that her ankles were causing her pain.
She chalked it up to competing, but as the pain grew worse over the next few months, she realized it was something more.
She was being plagued by a severe arthritic condition that was causing the cartilage in her joints to break down.
It was bad enough that by the summer of 1929, doctors said she would have to lose her foot.
Bobbie’s mother took care of her while she was on bed rest for eight months.
She iced her joints hoping to lessen the inflammation and help her heal.
Then she spent a year on crutches.
For over a year and a half one of Canada’s greatest athletes was on the sidelines and many thought it would be the end of her career.
But Bobbie had other plans.
According to one story, she went to watch her old hockey team play and watched them for the first two periods.
Unable to stand it, she went down to the dressing room, put on a pair of skates and went out on the ice.
That night, she scored the winning goal.
Bobbie Rosenfeld was back.
Although…in limited form.
In 1931, she was back playing softball and hockey and in her first year back she led the softball league in home runs.
By the following year, she was voted the top female hockey player in the entire province.
She also started to work as a sports journalist for the Montreal Daily Herald.
The four-month contract, turned into more and it came the perfect time because her arthritic condition was getting worse.
By 1933, it was clear that her it was time to retire, and she transitioned to managing and coaching.
She took the helm of the women’s athletic team for Canada at the 1934 British Empire Games in London, England.
Under her guidance, the women did quite well by winning gold in the sprint medley relay, and silver in the 100 yards, 80 metres hurdles, high jump and long jump.
She also managed the Lakeside Langley’s softball team and served on the executive for provincial hockey and softball associations.
But coaching didn’t always pay the bills, so Bobbie went back to journalism.
In 1936, she was hired at the Globe and Mail sports department as a contributing columnist. Originally called Feminine Sports Reel, it later became known simply as Sports Reel and it covered all levels of sports, for both men and women.
Through it she became an advocate for women’s sports and criticized those who called female athletes unladylike.
Katie Fisher from the Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame says Bobbie’s efforts helped women feel represented.
In July 1933, she wrote the article Girls are in Sports for Good attacking columnist Andy Lytle from the Vancouver Sun, who said women shouldn’t compete in intensive sports became women were not cast in the quote unquote “mannish mold”.
Bobbie responded with her wonderful wit. quote
“We are taking up the sword, and high time it is, in defense of our so-called athletic bodies to give the lie to those pen flourishers who depict us not as paragons of feminine physique, beauty and health, but rather as Amazons and ugly ducklings, all because we have become sport-minded.”
Sports Reel was one of the most popular columns in the Globe and Mail, and it helped make Bobbie even more famous.
Years later, the paper said of her column,
“It roamed along the highways and byways of sport with a refreshing candor that was one of her most likeable characteristics.”
In 1950, when it came time to choose the Greatest Canadian Female Athlete of the Half-Century, Bobbie won.
At the time Bobbie still held three Canadian records in the running broad jump, standing broad jump and discus throw.
All three records were set 22 years earlier in 1928.
The announcement of the honour on Dec. 28, 1950, came on an extra special day too It was Bobbie’s 46th birthday.
Being the Greatest Canadian Female Athlete of the Half-Century was the first of many.
In 1955, she was in the first class of inductees into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
She was joined by her 1928 Olympic teammates Ethel Smith, Myrtle Cook, Jane Bell and Ethel Catherwood.
Katie Fisher from Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame says it was a testament to her incredible efforts.
Her column, Sports Reel, ended in 1957 as the arthritis that plagued her for over two decades made it impossible to keep up with the grind.
The Globe and Mail gave her a job in the promotion department but eventually, the pain became too much, and she retired in 1966.
The woman who defined athletic excellence during her heyday, struggled to walk and for the next few years she underwent surgery to deal with the pain.
On Nov. 14, 1969, Ethel, Bobbie’s sister, became concerned.
She hadn’t heard from her in 24 hours so she l called the property manager of Bobbie’s building.
When he went into her apartment, he found one of the greatest athletes in Canadian history dead.
She had passed away in her sleep.
Bobbie won many races in her life, but like all of us, she couldn’t outrun the hands of time.
Bobbie Rosenfeld’s legacy is unmatched, and she’s been honoured repeatedly since her passing.
In 1976, she was recognized by the Government of Canada as a National Historic Person.
In Toronto, the park that sits between Rogers Centre and the CN Tower is named after her.
In 1996, Canada Post issued a stamp to celebrate her life and at the end of the 20th century, when it came time to choose the Greatest Female Athlete of the past 100 years she was on the list.
Skier Nancy Greene won, but in sixth place between rower Marnie McBean and speed skater Catriona Le May Doan, was Bobbie Rosenfeld.
But perhaps the greatest honour came only a few years after her death.
In 1978, the annual award given to Canada’s top female athlete of the year was renamed the Bobbie Rosenfeld Award.
Katie Fisher from Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame says that with each new recipient Bobbie’s legacy spreads,
As the Professional Women’s Hockey League breaks attendance records, Jessica Campbell becomes the first full-time female coach in the NHL and Hayley Wickenheiser serves as the assistant GM of the Maple Leafs we know it began with women Bobbie Rosenfeld Without her there may never have been a Perdita Felicien, Camryn Rogers or Jazz Shukla.
