James Robinson (runner)
American middle-distance runner
James J. Robinson Jr. (born August 27, 1954, in Oakland, California) is a former American middle-distance runner. He was the dominant American 800 meters runner from the mid-1970s through the mid 1980s. He ran in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, finishing fifth in his semi-final and not making the final. He was on the ill-fated 1980 U.S. Olympic team that did not get to compete due to the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott. He did however receive one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the spurned athletes.
His international achievements included a silver medal at the 1979 IAAF World Cup and 1981 IAAF World Cup and a gold medal at the 1979 Pan American Games over the reigning Olympic Gold Medalist and (until that week) world record holder, Alberto Juantorena. He also finished fifth in the 1983 World Championships in Athletics. Domestically he won the American title at 880 yard or 800 meters 7 times including five times in a row between 1978 and 1982. During that same period while Robinson was the best outdoors, he did not win a single Indoor title.
“James Robinson (runner)” enters the record as american middle-distance runner. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Robinson and runner 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 Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6142283. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1976, 1980 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Robinson (runner)” 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.