Women have always had to fight hard to compete in athletics. Three female swimming and diving events were introduced in 1912 and five kinds of athletic events in 1928. One was the 100 metre dash, at which three Canadian finalists horrified the predominantly male audience by hugging and kissing each other. That same year women raced over 800 metres but unfortunately some collapsed at the end, leading doctors to claim that women would suffer early senility if they undertook such “feats of endurance”.

In 1943, even when women were fully employed in the war effort, employers were advised to “Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.”

Even in 1948, of the 4,000 athletes competing in London, only 385 were women. They were permitted to compete in only nine athletics events, which included long jump and shot putting. At the European Championships in 1946, two of the fastest women athletes had afterwards been discovered to be men, so in 1948 sex testing was introduced.

It was in this atmosphere of distrust that a woman became the undoubted star of the London Olympics, and one of the most famous of all 20th-century athletes.

Fanny Blankers-Koen was born in the Netherlands in 1918 and made her Olympic debut as a high jumper in 1936. When she was a child, her father, who was a farmer, insisted that she drank whale-liver oil every day. At home she never bothered to open the garden gate, but vaulted or even hurdled it. As a 16-year-old she set a Dutch 800 metres record and at 20 gained her first world record in the 100 metres dash. By then she was being coached by Jan Blankers, the Olympic triple jumper, and in 1940 they married.

In 1943, two years after the birth of her first child, she broke world records in the 100 metres, high jump and long jump. After the birth of her daughter five years later, she took her children with her when training, feeding the baby in the changing-room while her son played in the sandpit of the long jump. Tall, sharp-featured and flaxen haired, she was now a world record-holder in six events and nicknamed “the Flying Housewife”.

The heats for the women's 100 metre dash had been run on Saturday, and on Monday, August 2 the semi-final was scheduled for 3.30pm with the final an hour later. It was raining.

Dorothy Manley, aged 21, was the favourite among three British runners: “My preparation was very low-key. I had a full-time job as a typist in the City for the Suez Canal Company, so I could only train after work for a couple of hours, four evenings a week.”

For the first time, women were permitted to wear sleeveless vests and shorts. Manley had sailed through her semi-final and joined Blankers-Koen in the final: “Fanny was a marvellous athlete. I'd never met her or even heard of her before. I was expecting to win, but everyone else was expecting her to. The whole atmosphere was quite awe-inspiring. I was so petrified before the race that if I could have run away I would have done.

“The gun went and I got a good start, but I thought it had been a flyer and that we would be recalled. That did for me. I would never have beaten Fanny, but I think I could have got closer to her. She was completely focused, whereas I was probably thinking about other things.”

With a high knee-lift and head held back, wearing baggy home-made orange cotton shorts, Blankers-Koen won the gold and Manley took silver. Manley stood on the podium with tears in her eyes. “Some newspapers wrote that I was crying because I hadn't won,” she remembered. “It was absolute nonsense. I was just choked with delight. I lost by a few feet. Even so, I had a great sense of achievement. Afterwards I ate some nice toad-in-the-hole.”

On the following morning, Tuesday, August 3, Blankers-Koen returned to the warming-up track behind Wembley Stadium to prepare herself for the hurdling event. She went through her usual warming-up routine but her mind was not on it. “All the time I was waiting for a glimpse of my rival Maureen Gardner, whom I had never seen before. I had read about her and though I had set the world record earlier that year, I knew only too well how many factors can upset form in sprinting races.”

Maureen Gardner, pretty with dimples and curly hair, was a 19-year-old English ballet teacher who had met her coach Geoff Dyson whilst jogging to recover from a dance injury. Both Gardner and Blankers-Koen won their heats and were in separate semi-finals that same afternoon. In her semi-final, Gardner had scraped a hurdle and lost her balance, but still came third to gain a place in the final.

The next morning, after she had been warming up for the final, Blankers said to his wife, “You are too old, Fanny.” He was quoting Jack Crump, the British team manager who had announced publicly that she was far too old for the Olympics. “It was just the thing to rouse me,” she remembered, “to make me go out there and prove to them that, even if I was 30 years old and the mother of two children, I could still be a champion.”

But her self-confidence was shattered when she got off to a late start: “The rest of the field were a yard ahead of me. What is a yard? What is a fraction of a second? Not much, you may say, but in a race over 80 metres it can mean the difference between defeat and victory. I raced after Maureen, sprinting as I had never sprinted before. By the time we reached the fifth hurdle I was level with Maureen, but I was going so fast that I went too close to the hurdle, hit it and lost my balance. After that is just a blurred memory. It was a grim struggle, in which my hurdling style went to pieces. I staggered like a drunkard.”

She leant so far forward at the end that the tape cut her neck, leaving blood on her vest. “It was quite a jolt for me to hear the British National Anthem being played. Had Maureen, then, won after all? No - the band were saluting the Royal Family, who had just arrived at the stadium.”

The suspense was not over: it was a photo-finish. When the result came up, Blankers-Koen jumped for joy: “I was proud to have beaten such a brilliant athlete.” Gardner and Blankers-Koen shared the same time, 11.2 seconds, which was a new world and Olympic record.

By the end of Wednesday, August 4, Fanny Blankers-Koen had been competing for six days and the strain of her success was getting to her: “I was missing my children and while the heats were OK because I was with the other Dutch girls, now I was very lonely. I was crying and I just wanted to go home and see my children.”

Jo Pfann, the Dutch women's team manager, could not persuade her to compete in the 200 metre dash, which had heats and semi-finals the next day. Jan Blankers told his wife, “If you don't want to run, it doesn't matter. Just go out there and try to make the final, that will be enough. You will be sorry afterwards if you don't at least try.” “He was right,” Fanny wrote later. “So I had a good cry and felt much better.”

Blankers-Koen's mood improved as soon as she had qualified for the final alongside Britain's Audrey Williamson, a strongly built servicewoman in the Royal Army Corps and an army champion. Also running in the final was Mickey Patterson, who had almost missed out on the US trials when she had burnt her leg with an iron. As if this wasn't enough, minutes before the start she got locked inside the dressing-room and had to sprint to the line. It was all worth it, though, because she came third and became the first ever African-American woman to win an Olympic medal.

Blankers-Koen and Williamson were in a photo-finish from which Blankers-Koen emerged with her third gold, and Williamson took silver, half a second behind. Mr and Mrs Blankers-Koen celebrated with supper at a Lyons Corner House in the West End. She added a fourth gold in the relay.

“How strange that I had made so many people happy,” wrote Blankers-Koen. “It made me proud to know I had been able to bring joy into people's lives. My winning those medals was good propaganda for all women.”

Almost single-handedly she transformed women's athletics from a sideshow into a central feature of future Olympics. The British athletes Dorothy Manley, Audrey Williamson and Maureen Gardner are probably better known for having come second to Blankers-Koen than they would have been had they won.

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