Margaret Varner Bloss

Margaret Varner Bloss (born October 4, 1927) is an American retired athlete and a professor of physical education from El Paso, Texas who excelled in three distinctly different racket sports: badminton, squash, and tennis.

Varner Bloss is the only person to have represented the US at the highest level of international competition in all three sports, and is the only person to have won the U.S. national singles championships of both badminton and squash or to have been inducted into the respective U.S. halls of fame of both sports.

Badminton career Varner's most impressive accomplishments came in badminton, which she took up at Texas Woman's University in the late 1940s, having gained prominence in junior and collegiate tennis. The fact that she won only one U.S. Singles title in badminton (1955) is largely attributable to the presence of two formidable contemporaries: Ethel Marshall and Judy Devlin Hashman. After helping to secure victory in the second of these triennial events, she retired from badminton competition. She was inducted into the U.S. Badminton Hall of Fame (now called the Walk of Fame) in 1965 and the World Badminton Hall of Fame in 1999. She eventually played the circuit of national and international tournaments which, in this amateur-only era, were generally held in the six-month span alternating with that of most badminton and squash tournaments.

Although she never reached the relative heights in tennis that she did in badminton and squash, she was a strong enough player to reach the final of Wimbledon women's doubles in 1958, losing to Althea Gibson and Maria Bueno. Her Wimbledon partner that year was Margaret Osborne duPont with whom she formed a friendship that became a life partnership following duPont's divorce. In 1961 and 1962, the duPont-Varner partnership won doubles matches for U.S. Wightman Cup teams that defeated Great Britain. In 1996, they were ranked as Top Twenty Racehorse Owners by Thoroughbred Times.