Gayle Hopkins
Profile
Gayle Hopkins was a track athlete from Davenport who went on to have a successful career at Arizona and competed in the 1964 Olympics*. Gayle broke Jesse Owens' long jump record at the Drake Relays**.
* Olympics were held in Tokyo, and introduced Judo and Volleyball as medal events.
** I mean any time you get to mention "broke Jesse Owens' ... record", that means you're pretty good
Personal Notes
When building my personal database, I've used a bunch of resources, starting with Wikipedia, BaseballReference, Football Reference, etc. The additions I enjoy the most are the random ones I find reading an article about someone else. I was researching James Jones for a previous post, and they were mentioning other famous athletes from Davenport, including Gayle Hopkins. I bring up his wikipedia page and find it having very little info, so I had to dig to find he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Iowa, and attended college in Colorado and Arizona. So great, he has the Iowa connection, but does he have any cards? He does, and I already had it!
I had bought a box of the Arizona Collegiate cards at a National Show a couple years back in order to get the Lute Olsen cards and little did I know that I also had the RC of one of the best track athletes to come from Iowa.
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