William Bruce JENNER

While in high school, Bruce Jenner three times won the Eastern States water ski championship and placed well in the Connecticut State High School track & field meet, but he gave no indication that he would one day become the world's greatest athlete. Jenner went to tiny Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, on a football scholarship, but shortly took up the decathlon and only one year later qualified for the 1972 Olympic team. After placing 10th in the 1972 Olympic decathlon, Jenner won the 1974 AAU title and in 1975 he was PanAm champion and set a world record (8,524) in the triangular meet with the USSR and Poland. In 1976, Jenner won his second AAU title and crowned a brilliant career by taking the Olympic gold medal with a new world record of 8,618 points. The charismatic Jenner became a television and movie personality as soon as his competitive days were over. After splitting with his first wife, he married Linda Thompson, who was Elvis Presley's girlfriend when that legend passed away in 1977. After that marriage ended in divorce, Jenner married Kris Kardashian, ex-wife of Robert Kardashian, one of O. J. Simpson's lawyers, and star of a reality television series in the United States.