Dave Bolen
American sprinter and diplomat
David Benjamin Bolen (December 23, 1923 – December 10, 2022) was an American track and field athlete, Olympian, diplomat and businessman.
Biography
Bolen competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in the 400 metres. He finished fourth in the final behind Arthur Wint, Herb McKenley and Mal Whitfield. In 2012, Bolen told The Boulder Daily Camera that "The Olympics is not something you train for. You have to have talent, world-class talent. You have to use that talent for the benefit of yourself and others." Bolen first discovered that he had that talent when he raced other children during an Easter egg hunt during his childhood and found that he was faster. He later decided he wanted to use his "foot speed" to gain a college education.
Bolen graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1950, and was the university's first Olympic athlete. Before serving for two years in the Army Air Force in WWII, he attended Southern University in New Orleans; after his service, he was recruited by CU Boulder track and field coach Frank Potts.
Later, Bolen's career took him to the US State Department.
“Dave Bolen” enters the record as american sprinter and diplomat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dave, Bolen and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5228376. VIAF identifies the subject as 48951699. The Library of Congress control number is no2004122038. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 2022, 1948 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dave Bolen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.