Halina Konopacka

Halina Konopacka (full name Leonarda Kazimiera Konopacka-Matuszewska-Szczerbińska; 26 February 1900 – 28 January 1989) was a Polish athlete. She won the discus throw event at the 1928 Summer Olympics, defeating American silver medal winner Lillian Copeland, breaking her own world record, and becoming the first Polish Olympic champion. After retiring from athletics she became a writer and poet. She immigrated to the United States after World War II, and died there.

Biography Konopacka was born in Rawa Mazowiecka, Congress Poland, and grew up in Warsaw, where she trained in horse riding, swimming, and skating. Her whole family also played tennis, including her father Jakub, sister Czesława, and brother Tadeusz. While studying at the Faculty of Philology of the Warsaw University she also took up skiing and athletics, but soon abandoned winter sports because the training facilities were too far from her home. In 1926, after only a few months of training, she set her first world record in the discus throw, which was then followed by two more records in 1927 and 1928.

In September 1939, at the onset of World War II, she helped her husband, Ignacy Matuszewski, the former Minister of the Treasury in the Polish Government, evacuate the gold reserves of the Polish National Bank to France to help finance the Polish government-in-exile. After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, the couple immigrated to the United States, arriving there through Spain, Portugal and Brazil in September 1941. After her husband died suddenly in New York in 1946, she founded a skiing school near New York City, as well as tried her hand at fashion design and ran a boutique shop there. In 1949, she married George Szczerbiński, an accomplished tennis player. After her second husband's death in 1959, she moved to Florida, where in 1960 she graduated from an art college at which point she became a painter, working under the alias of Helen George. She painted mostly flowers. She died on 28 January 1989,

Works Któregoś dnia, Warszawa : Heliodor, 2008. , Halina Konopacka; Maria Rotkiewicz, Wznosiłam świat miłością, Warszawa : Spółka Wydawnicza Heliodor, 1994, ,