Moments after King George VI had declared the Games of the XIV Olympiad open and the former Cambridge University 400m runner John Mark had lit the Olympic flame in Wembley Stadium, the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stood to make his dedicatory address.

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“When the Games are over,” he said, “those who have taken part in them should return to their homes as torch bearers, not indeed bearing the visible light just carried into the arena but with the flame of goodwill burning in their hearts and continuing to burn there long after the Olympic flame has been extinguished.”

Fanny Blankers-Koen, named the women athlete of the 20th century by the International Association of Athletics Federations in 1999 at a gala in Monte Carlo, was not there to hear his words. Her husband and coach, Jan Blankers, had refused her permission to walk with the Netherlands team in the opening parade, deeming it “too tiring”. But the Dutchwoman, who went on to emulate Jesse Owens’s four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics 12 years earlier, embodied the archbishop’s aspirations more than anyone else, demolishing prejudices about gender, age and motherhood and, as a pioneer and standard-bearer who inspired millions, establishing the legitimacy of women’s sport in an Olympic movement that had been the preserve of male competitors until 1928.

The woman lauded for her feats on Wembley’s damp and unresponsive cinder track as “the Flying Housewife” and, more cleverly, “the flying Dutchmam”, was 30 and the mother of a six-year-old son, Jantje, and three-year-old daughter, Fanneke.

Born in Baarn in the province of Utrecht, Blankers-Koen’s father, Arnold Koen, a farmer who competed in the shot and discus, encouraged his daughter to take up athletics. Impressed by her effervescence – she used to run at full pelt on errands, vaulting the garden gate – Arnold took her along with him to local meetings where she quickly began to win multiple events. She also showed immense promise at swimming and skating but concentrated on athletics after joining the Amsterdam Dames’ Athletic Club in 1935 at the age of 16, cycling the 18 miles there and back from her home in Hoofddorp.

A year later she set a national record for the 800m, an event that would have precluded her from Olympic glory. At the Amsterdam Games in 1928 Lina Radke won the 800m in world-record time but six of the nine runners in the final had collapsed with exhaustion in extreme humidity and the event was banned until 1960.

Blankers-Koen’s versatility saved her from international obscurity and her aptitude for sprinting and jumping earned her a place in the Dutch team for the 1936 Olympics where she finished sixth in the high jump and fifth as a member of the 4x100m relay team. In Berlin she met Owens, his autograph becoming her most treasured possession. “When I met him again at the Munich Olympics in 1972,” she recalled, “I said I still have your autograph, I’m Fanny Blankers-Koen. He said: ‘You don’t have to tell me who you are, I know everything about you.’ Isn’t that incredible? Jesse Owens knew who I was.”

In 1938 she set her first world record, 11sec dead for the 100 yards, and won bronze medals in the 100m and 200m at the European Championships held in Vienna. The Dutch press predicted that the 1940 Olympics, scheduled to be held in Helsinki, would be her stage to shine. However, international sport was suspended on the outbreak of war in 1939 and Blankers-Koen spent the next six years at home near Amsterdam which was occupied following the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and not liberated until the Nazis officially surrendered in May 1945.

In 1940 she had married her coach, Jan Blankers, twice a former national triple-jump champion who was 14 years her senior. Domestic sport continued under occupation and Blankers-Koen set six world records – in the high jump, long jump, 80m hurdles, 100 yard dash, 4x110 yard relay and 4x200m relay – from 1942-44. All were achieved after the birth of her son and in the face of criticism that she was acting selfishly by not retiring to devote herself solely to motherhood.

The family survived the Hongerwinter of 1944-45, when the German blockade cut off supplies of food to the Nazi-occupied regions of the Netherlands and famine was widespread, and she gave birth to Fanneke in 1945, the year of liberation. She did not train during the latter stages of pregnancy but after seven months off she resumed her regime, absurdly light by modern standards, of twice weekly two-hour sessions, taking the children with her to the track in the basket of her bicycle.

“What will happen to my milk supply if I train and race?” she asked her doctor. Her concerns were assuaged enough to attempt to carry on when he replied: “You won’t know until you try.”

At the first post-war European Championships, held at the Bislett Stadium in Oslo in August 1946, Blankers-Koen won the 80m hurdles, anchored the 4x100m squad to gold and finished fourth in the high jump.

In 1948, at the age of 30, she ran a world-record equalling 11.5sec for the 100m but was subjected to intense criticism for stating her intention to travel to London for the Olympics. “I got very many bad letters, people writing that I must stay home with my children and that I should not be allowed to run on a track with – how do you say it? – short trousers,” she told the New York Times in 1982. “But I was a good mother. I had no time for much besides my house chores and training, and when I went shopping it was only to buy food for the family and never to buy dresses.

“One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children. When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said: ‘I show you.’”

Probability suggests she was referring to Jack Crump, who was not only the honorary secretary of the British Amateur Athletic Board and team manager of the Olympic athletics team but also a BBC commentator and Daily Telegraph athletics correspondent. What is certain is that Crump’s famous pre-Games verdict, that Blankers-Koen was “too old to make the grade”, was as miscalculated and provocative a sporting prediction as the one Alan Hansen delivered on Manchester United’s title ambitions after one game of the 1995-96 Premier League season.

A pre-Games stipulation that athletes could enter only a maximum of three individual events meant that Blankers-Koen was forced to forgo the high and long jumps in which she was the current world record holder.

Germany and Japan were barred from participating at London 1948 and the Soviet Union declined an invitation to compete. Great Britain, mired in austerity to pay back the debts accrued during the second world war, was not even able as host to supply food for the visiting athletes who had to bring their own provisions to London. Based with four other teams at St Helen’s school in Norwood, Blankers-Koen took the train to Wembley for each of her events, completing her journey on foot.

Her first event was the 100m and she won her heat and semi-final comfortably. Clement Attlee, in his opening address as prime minister, had said: “May the weather be fine, the events well contested and may records be broken.” He was to be disappointed with the first of these ambitions, much of the athletics programme took part in wet and windy conditions.

Blankers-Koen felt that the margins of victory she achieved to qualify for the final had been deceptive, thinking her fellow sprinters had been holding themselves back. But wearing the white shirt and orange shorts of the Dutch team, her knees pumping high and her head held back, she discovered that her pre-eminence had not been an illusion, storming to the tape three yards ahead of Great Britain’s Dorothy Manley. “If I won gold I had told my father he should dance around the table,” she said. “On the radio I told him it was time to start dancing after I won the 100m.”

That night back at her digs she told her husband: “I am an Olympic champion and I don’t want to run any more.” She said she had achieved her goal and that she was missing her children but Jan knew her better, an impression her daughter, who did not subscribe to the common perception of her mother in later years as a benevolent and modest person, recounted in Kees Kooman’s biography Een Koningen Met Mannenbenen – A Queen with Man’s Legs. “My mother never loved herself and, the other way round, she could not give love and friendship herself to other people,” she said. “My mother only enjoyed herself when she was being worshipped.”

Blankers told her to go to bed and rest for the following day’s hurdles heats and she qualified with ease. The final, however, was her toughest race so far and Blankers-Koen said she had felt intimidated by the home favourite Maureen Gardner’s form in the preceding races. She started poorly. “Nobody could have felt less like a champion,” she said. “My knees trembled. I hit the fifth hurdle, my style went to pieces and I staggered home like a drunkard.” The roars of the crowd as the Dutchwoman and Britain’s Gardner seemed to hit the tape, literally neck and neck, suggested to Blankers-Koen that her rival would get the decision but, as she told the Sunday Times’ David Walsh in 1999, she thought she had nicked it. “I just leaned forward enough to get in front of Maureen. I leaned so low, the tape cut my neck and the blood trickled on to my vest.” She was right, she had won and Jan embraced her. “See, you aren’t too old after all,” he said.

Again she said she felt she had achieved enough and tried to withdraw from the 200m. Sobbing in the Wembley dressing rooms minutes before the start of her heat she told her husband she wanted to go home. “You can go home if you wish,” he said. “But in time you will be sorry. Just go out there and try to make the final, that will be enough.” She stormed into the final and on 6 August, after a rain delay, slaughtered the field, beating Britain’s Audrey Williamson into silver by 0.7sec, still the largest margin of victory in an Olympics 200m final.

That night she had the party she craved after winning the 100m, going to a party in the West End with journalists and savouring a glass of wine. The next morning she went shopping, spending so long choosing her ideal raincoat that by the time the crowded train delivered her to Wembley her team-mates in the relay squad had already begun warming up on the track.

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She was running the anchor leg and the efforts of Xenia Stad de Jong, Gerda van der Kade-Koudijs and Nettie Witziers-Timmer had put her in fourth place when she received the baton, a few yards behind Australia’s Joyce King. “I thought to myself I could never win this, never, never, never,” she said. “Then with 50m to go I thought: ‘Maybe I have a chance.’ I ran faster than I have ever run, getting closer all the time, until a couple of metres from the line, I went into the lead.”

Two days later she boarded a train at Liverpool Street for Harwich and the journey home to Amsterdam. In her luggage were the four gold medals, 64 years later still the greatest individual haul by a woman track and field athlete, at a single Olympic Games. She went home to receive Queen Juliana’s praise, a knighthood in the Order of Orange Nassau and a gift of a bicycle from the people of Amsterdam. But more than that she went home with the spoils of victory over sexism that kept the Archbishop of York’s beacon of hope burning for the women of the world.

What the Guardian wrote

5 August 1948



The King and Queen entered the Royal Box here today a few moments too late to see one of the finest races so far in the London Olympic Games. They missed seeing F Blankers-Koen (Holland) pressed so hotly to the last inch of the women’s 80 metres hurdles by both M Gardner (Great Britain) and SB Strickland (Australia) that though she won in a new world and Olympic record time of 11.2sec, Gardner was so close that they both returned the same time and Strickland was barely a yard away.

Blankers-Koen is easily the outstanding all-round woman athlete of her day. Off the track she is as feminine as man’s capricious heart could wish. On it not only is she as expert technically as most men champions but her actual foot and leg movements are straight like a man’s rather than a woman’s and temperamentally she is a lesson to all. She is cheerful before going to her mark, is as steady as a rock on it and then starts as though she herself had been fired.

In today’s final Gardner was at her best and much cooler than yesterday. She actually had the better of the start and led over the first hurdle. At the seventh flight, however, the Dutch woman was a yard ahead and Strickland was coming with a great rush. Gardner was quicker away again on the run-in, gained on both and left many of the spectators in delicious half-belief in a British victory.