When the darkest imaginable shadow fell on the free world, it took a little girl to stand up and light the torch. A sixteen-year-old girl, Betty Robinson, is perpetually late. She is late for school and late for the Chicago-bound train that would take her out of her small town of Riverdale, Illinois early one morning in 1927. The townspeople knew she might still catch the train, because in a time when girls played with dolls, this wiry-framed girl was different. She could run. Riding on the same train was Charles Price, a man who habitually checks his pocket watch. He's going to Chicago as the track and field coach who must pick the 1928 US Olympic team for the Amsterdam games. Price has never seen a girl run fast enough to catch a departing train. He doesn't believe that his watch is working because this tiny girl just chased a train to set the 100-meter world record. The true story of Betty Robinson's life and her sprint from a small Illinois town to the capitals of Europe takes her through three Olympic games. Her first in Amsterdam makes her the fastest woman on earth. The second-- in 1932 Los Angeles--she is forced to watch despondently while convalescing in a nursing home. A tragic and near-fatal airplane crash has left her a virtual cripple, one who is lucky to be alive. With the help of her coach, Betty rekindles her Olympic spirit just in time for the 1936 Berlin games, when the German sprinters and their leader, Adolf Hitler, plan to demonstrate for the first time what national dominance in sports might mean for the rest of the world.