Prominent Poles
Janusz Tadeusz Kusocinski athlete, winner of the 10000 m event at the Los Angeles 1932 Summer Olympics.; hero of WWII
Born: January 15, 1907 in Warsaw, Russian partition of Poland
Died: June 21, 1940 in Palmiry (executed by the Nazi-Germans)
Early days. Born into the family of a railroad clerk, Janusz Kusocinski, or Kusy as he was nicknamed, played football for various Warsaw clubs as a schoolboy. In 1928 he finished a gardening high school and in 1937 he obtained a high school diploma. In 1938 he finished CIWF in Warsaw.
Career. He took up athletics in 1928 after joining the sport club "Sarmata". In 1929 he left "Sarmata" and moved to "Warszawianka."In his first competition at the Polish National Championships, Kusocinski surprisingly won the 5000 m and cross country titles. He missed the next season, because he was called to duty by the Polish army, but he came back stronger than ever. He won the Polish Championship titles in the 1500 m and the 5000 m, in cross country in 1930 and 1931, and in the 800 m in 1932. In 1932 Kusocinski was working as a gardener in a park in Warsaw. Just about a month before the Los Angeles Olympics, he ran a new world record in the 3000 m and later that year, he set a new unofficial world record in running 4 miles. At the Olympics, Kusocinski won a close battle against the Finns Iso-Hollo and Virtanen in the 10 000 m. After finishing second in the first European Championships at Turin in the 5000 m, Kusocinski decided to retire from athletics, but made a comeback in 1939 by winning the 10 000 m at the Polish National Championships. Kusocinski volunteered for the Polish army after Poland was attacked by the Germans and was wounded twice in defense of Warsaw. On September 28, 1939 he was awarded a Cross of Valor (Krzyz Walecznych). During the German occupation he worked as a waiter, but was secretly a member of the Polish resistance (pseudo "Prawdzic"). Janusz Kusocinski was arrested by the Gestapo in March, 1940 during the AB Action and imprisoned in Mokotow prison in Warsaw. He was executed three months later in Palmiry, near Warsaw. Since 1954 an annual athletics competition, the Kusocinski Memorial, is held in Poland in his honor. In 2009 he was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta. There is his statue in Dolsk and many schools are named after him.
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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Janusz Kusocinski" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
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