A Proper Obituary For America's First Women's Olympic Champion (Who Happened To Win In Golf)

Thanks to all who sent in the New York Times special project to document and properly memorialize the lives of 15 women on International Women's Day.

The package kicks off with a remembrance of Margaret Abbott, America's first Olympic champion who happened to win at the Paris golf competition in 1900.

But even up to her death, Abbott was not aware that she is officially America's first female Olympic champ, writes Margalit Fox:

Though men’s and women’s golf appear to have been earmarked as Olympic events from the beginning, Welch said, few competitors seem to have realized the fact.

Abbott apparently thought that she was playing in a small, self-contained tournament, held at a course in Compiègne, some 50 miles north of Paris. She had entered it simply because she played golf and happened to be in France.

“They were calling it ‘Exposition Competition,’ ‘Paris World’s Fair Competition,’” Welch explained. “Because ‘Olympics’ wasn’t attached to it, she didn’t know.”