Background
Konopacka was born in Rawa Mazowiecka, Russian Empire, and grew up in Warsaw, where she trained in horse riding, swimming and skating.
Konopacka was born in Rawa Mazowiecka, Russian Empire, and grew up in Warsaw, where she trained in horse riding, swimming and skating.
After retiring from athletics she became a writer and poet. She immigrated to the United States after World World War II and died there. While studying at the Faculty of Philology of the Warsaw University she also took up skiing and athletics, but soon abandoned winter sports because the training facilities were too far from her home.
In 1926 she set her first world record in the discus throw, after only a few months of training, which followed by two more records in 1927 and 1928.
Konopacka had dark skin and brown eyes owing to her Tatar ancestors. She always wore a red beret while competing, and had a model-like body shape, for which she was nicknamed "Mission Olympia".
She retired from athletics in 1931, but continued to do sports recreationally, including skiing, tennis and car races, and was listed as one of the best Polish tennis players until 1937. Being a well-educated woman fluent in three foreign languages, she engaged in writing.
She wrote her first book of poetry Któregoś dnia (Some Day) back in 1929, and later published her poems in the literary magazine of the Skamander group and in the Wiadomości Literackie, the premier literary periodical of the interbellum Poland, earning recognition of established writers such as Mieczysław Grydzewski, Kazimierz Wierzyński and Antoni Słonimski.
According to professor Anna Nasiłowska, Konopacka"s works were valued for their feminist approach in analyzing the relationship between the man and the woman, and for their reminiscences of youth and the treatment of the topic of jealousy. After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, the couple immigrated to the United States, arriving there through Spain, Portugal and Brazil in September 1941. Her husband suddenly died in New York in 1946, after which Konopacka remarried (to George Szczerbinski in 1949), founded a skiing school near New York, designed clothing and ran a boutique shop.
She mostly painted flowers under the alias Helen George.
She was a guest of honor at both the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics, and a member of the Polish Olympic Committee in 1938–1939.