Mel patton biography

Mel Patton, an Olympic gold medalist and USC sprinter who at one time was deemed the fastest human on Earth, has died. He was 89.

Patton, who had cancer, died May 9 at his Fallbrook, Calif., home, his wife, Shirley Patton said.

“Pell Mel,” as he was called, set world records for the 100-yard dash in 1948 and the 220 in 1949. His 100-yard mark of 9.3 seconds endured until 1961, when Frank Budd beat it by a tenth of a second.

At the 1948 Olympics in London, Patton ran before British royalty on a cinder track built from the pulverized remains of bombed-out buildings. In the 200-meter competition, he won a gold. In the 4x100-meter relay, he anchored a U.S. team that finally received its gold medals after judges wrongly awarded them to the United Kingdom.

“We were doggone better than the Brits and we knew doggone well that we beat them, and we were upset about it,” Patton recalled in an oral history for the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles.

After successfully challenging the judges’ call on a baton pass, the four men

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