Rebekah Colberg
Puerto Rican basketball player

Dr. Rebekah Colberg Cabrera (December 25, 1918 – July 8, 1985), was a Puerto Rican athlete, who was known as "The Mother of Women's Sports in Puerto Rico". Colberg participated in various athletic competitions in the 1938 Central American and Caribbean Games celebrated in Panama where she won the gold medals in Discus and Javelin throw.
Early years
Rebekah Colberg Cabrera was born on December 25, 1918, in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico to Vicente Lupercio Colberg Pabón, a pharmacy technician, and María Providencia Cabrera Ramírez de Arellano, a housewife. Her great-great-grandmother was the sister of the early-19th century Puerto Rican pirate Roberto Cofresí Ramírez de Arellano. Colberg was born two months premature when her mother was just seven months pregnant. Colberg, whose birth weight was only four pounds during birth, would later break sports barriers for Puerto Rican women. Even though there used to be a lot of discrimination in sports against women, Colberg was to prove that women did have the potential to be great athletes, if given the chance.
Colberg graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a bachelor's degree in science and pharmacy. She received her Masters in physical education from Columbia University in New York and her Doctorate in medicine from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The public source identifies “Rebekah Colberg” as puerto Rican basketball player. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rebekah, Colberg and Puerto.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7301996. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1985 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rebekah Colberg” 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.