Barred from participating in the Olympics

Violette Paule Emilie Marie Morris (18 April 1893 – 26 April 1944),

The youngest of six sisters, she spent her adolescence in a convent, L’Assomption de Huy. She married Cyprien Gouraud on August 22, 1914. (They later divorced in May 1923).  With the onset of WWI he left for the front & she served as a nurse during the Battle of the Somme & as a motorcycle courier & ambulance driver during the Battle of Verdun.

Standing 5 ft 5 in tall & weighing 150 lb, she was a gifted athlete: soccer, water polo, tennis, archery, weightlifting, & Greco-Roman wrestling. A butch character who smoked two to three packs of cigarettes per day, she also was the French national boxing champion of 1923. She raced planes, motorcycles & automobiles (won the 1927 Bol d’Or, the 24 hour car race at Fontainebleau).  It was said that she underwent a double mastectomy in order to fit into her race car better. Evidently, one of her male lovers, Raoul Paoli (Raymond Simonpaoli), thought that her elective surgery went far beyond the androgynous garçonne-look, so he leaked the names of her female lovers to the press. Subsequently, she was refused license renewal by the Fédération française sportive féminine (French Women’s Athletic Federation) amid complaints of her lifestyle & was therefore barred from participating in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

It December 1935 she was a recruited by the Sicherheitsdienst, “SD,” the Nazi Security Service, to become a German informant.  She was even invited to attend the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin at the personal behest of Adolf Hitler. She gave Germany partial plans of the Maginot Line, detailed plans of strategic points within the city of Paris, & schematics of the French army’s cavalry tank, the Somua S35.

One of her responsibilities during the war was to penetrate French resistance networks which were assisted by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). As a member of the Carlingue, a French auxiliary of the Gestapo, she was able to torture detainees with impunity; her sadism earning her the nickname of the “Gestapo’s Hyena”.  She was killed in a resistance-led ambush as a traitor to the French state.