Mary Decker
American athletics competitor, middle distance runner, long distance runner
Mary Teresa Decker, (born August 4, 1958) is an American retired middle-distance and long-distance runner. During her career, she won gold medals in the 1500 meters and 3000 meters at the 1983 World Championships and was the world-record holder in the mile, 5000 meters and 10,000 meters. In total, she set 17 official and unofficial world records, and she was the first woman to break 4:20 for the mile. She also set 36 U.S. national records at distances ranging from 800 meters to 10,000 meters, and has held the U.S. record in the 2000 meters and 3000 meters since the early 1980s, while her 1500 meters record stood for 32 years and her mile record stood for 38 years. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. She was retroactively banned for two years from June 1996 for a doping violation for a high testosterone to epitestosterone ratio.
Career
In 1973, she set her first world record, running an indoor mile in 4:40.1. By 1974, Decker was the world indoor record holder with 2:02.4 for 880 yards, and 2:01.8 for 800 meters.
By the end of 1974, Decker had developed a case of the muscle condition compartment syndrome. This resulted in a series of injuries that prevented her from competing in the 1976 Summer Olympics because of stress fractures in her lower leg.
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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 Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q238299. VIAF identifies the subject as 65383323. The Library of Congress control number is n83130356. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1500, 1983 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Decker” 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.