Mary Slaney

America's greatest middle-distance runner — and the fall that defined the 1984 Olympics.

Mary Teresa Decker was born in Bunnvale, New Jersey in 1958. She is the most successful American middle-distance runner in history — setting 17 world records across distances from 800m to one mile. She was denied the chance to compete in the 1976 and 1980 Olympics — the first by injury, the second by the US boycott. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics she fell after contact with Zola Budd — the most watched individual athletic incident in US Olympic history, watched by over 200 million viewers — and did not finish. She never won an Olympic medal. She was one of the most commercially valuable American athletes of the early 1980s despite her Olympic absence.

One of America's greatest middle-distance runners despite Olympic heartbreak

• World Champion 1500m and 3000m 1983
• American records multiple