August 1948 ‘Flying Housewife’ Blankers-koen wins four Olympic golds
Fanny Blankers-koen was 30 when she arrived in England for the 1948 Olympics, the mother of a six-year-old son, Jantje, and three-year-old daughter, Fanneke. Her sex, for once, was not the principal incitement for critics in the build-up to the Games. This time it was her motherhood and age.
“One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children,” she said in 1982. “When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said, ‘I show you’.” Sadly for us, she was talking about 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 The Daily Telegraph’s athletics correspondent. Show him, she certainly did.
Born in Baarn, in Holland, the daughter of a farmer who was a shot-putter and discus thrower, he took her along to meetings where she quickly began winning multiple sprinting and jumping events before joining the Amsterdam Dames’ Athletic Club in 1935, aged 16.
She earned 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 4x100 metres relay team. In Berlin she met Jesse 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?”
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. The Dutch press predicted that the 1940 Olympics, due to be held in Helsinki, would be hers to dominate, but 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 under Nazi occupation for five years from May 1940.
Domestic sport continued during those years 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.
At the first postwar 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 said. 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 world recordholder. It might have been six but she settled for four gold medals, equalling
Champion: Fanny Blankers-koen strikes 100m gold in London; with her children at the zoo (top) and the family at home (left)
Owens at the 1936 Games, winning the 100m, 200m (by a record margin, 0.7sec, which still stands), 80m hurdles and 4x100m relay.
Seventy-three years on, it remains the greatest individual haul by a female track and field athlete at an Olympic Games. She went home to receive Queen Juliana’s praise, a knighthood in the Order of Orange Nassau and the gift of a bicycle from the people of Amsterdam.
In 1999, at the age of 81, Blankers-koen was named the female athlete of the 20th century by the International Association of Athletics Federations. It was no less than the woman praised for her feats at a bleakly rain-sodden Wembley as “the Flying Housewife” and, rather brilliantly, “the flying Dutchmam” deserved.