Irena Szewinska, Champion Polish Sprinter, Is Dead at 72

Irena Szewinska won a gold medal and set a world record in the women’s 400-meter event at the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal on July 29, 1976.Irena Szewinska, a sprinter and long jumper who won seven medals in five Olympic Games, tying an Olympic women’s record and becoming a national hero in Poland, died on Friday at a hospital in Warsaw. She was 72.

The cause was cancer, said Henryk Urbas, the press spokesman for the Polish Olympic Committee.

Szewinska’s athletic accomplishments and long run of Olympic appearances led many to consider her one of the greatest Polish athletes of the 20th century. In a tribute on Twitter, President Andrzej Duda of Poland called her “the first lady of Polish…