THE ORIGINAL OLYMPIC GOLDEN GIRL
GB trailblazer Mary Rand on Olympic glory at Tokyo in 1964 and the joys of family life at 80...
IT is 6pm in Austin’s, a friendly neighbourhood restaurant on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, and Mary Rand is sitting at a table by the window. It is some weeks ago and the Diamond Peak ski resort is still open.
People at another table are talking about how beautiful it is to fly down the slopes with the sun on your face and feel as if you are going to ski straight into the lake’s clear waters far below. A television screen above the bar is showing an ice hockey game.
Looking back, it already feels like another world, a time before social distancing and l ockdowns and the classification of Covid-19 as a pandemic.
There is not yet any suggestion that the Olympic Games in Tokyo this summer could be delayed and Mary reaches into her bag for her phone, puts on her glasses and begins to scroll through some of the old pictures that one of her three daughters has sent her. No one in this small, quiet community knows they have one of Britain’s Olympic greats in their midst, one of our immortal Girls of Summer.
The Somerset lilt in her voice that mixes with her California accent is the only real clue to her past and, even though she is 80, she still exudes the life-force of a champion. Age has not dulled her spirit or her humour. They shine within her.
She smiles as she looks at the pictures. One is a photo of her in running kit in a carriage on the London Underground in the 1960s, a posse of photographers crowded around her. It was part of a trans-Atlantic challenge that involved Mary flying to New York and then running up flights of stairs all the way to the top of the Empire State Building.
She laughs out loud as she stares at that luminous image of another life. ‘I did all sorts of crazy stuff back then,’ she says.
Mary was a bombshell in the Sixties. She was British sport’s original Golden Girl. One newspaper writer called her ‘Marilyn Monroe on spikes’. Mick Jagger said she was his dream date.
When the Olympics were staged in Tokyo in 1964, she became the first female British athlete to win track and field gold when she broke the world record on her way to a triumph in the long jump. At those Games, which represented Japan’s re-emergence on the world stage after the horrors of the Second World War, Mary also became the first athlete to win gold, silver and bronze at a single Games after she finished second in the pentathlon and was part of the team that came third in the 4x100 metres relay.
‘Mary was the most gifted athlete I ever saw,’ said Ann Packer, who won gold with a brilliant, nerveless run in the Tokyo 800m. ‘She was as good as athletes get. There has never been anything like her since. And I don’t believe there ever will be again.’
Mary was a pathfinder. At a time when women’s sport was still often an afterthought, she blazed a trail.
Perhaps because she moved to the States in 1969 and has lived out the rest of her life in California and now Nevada, the scale of her contribution to British Olympic history is sometimes overlooked. It shouldn’t be.
What she achieved in 1964 will always be a landmark for women’s sport in this country and now that Tokyo’s second staging of the Games has been postponed, she represents the best opportunity we have to take refuge in remembrance of things past.
Mary looks down at the pictures again. Next is a photo of her running on a country road, her blonde hair blowing in the wind, next to her second husband, the 1968 Olympic men’s decathlon gold medallist, Bill Toomey, who looks l i ke a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Sinatra and is gazing at her adoringly.
Mary lived fast back then. She married her first husband, British rower Sid Rand, five weeks after she met him. Five years later, she left him to be with Toomey, flew to California to start a new life and married him in 1969.
‘I guess I was a little impetuous back then,’ she says. She never lived in England again.
Finally she holds up a picture of herself in mid-life, flanked by three young women. On the right is her daughter, Samantha, on the left her other children, Alison and Sarah.
Mary was feted for her athletics achievements and won BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1964 but she is in no doubt about what has brought her the most pride. She takes the phone back and stares at the picture again. ‘My kids are my finest achievement,’ she says.
The next day, Mary sits at the kitchen table in Sarah’s house in Incline Village, a few hundred yards from the lake. She has been living here for more than a year, since her third husband, John, died suddenly. They had been married for 26 years after meeting on a blind date.
‘A friend told me he had a truck and a Harley,’ says Mary, laughing, ‘and I said “a truck and a Harley are all I need”. John was the best thing that ever happened to me.’
She is at the heart of a loving family. She has eight surviving grandchildren — one of Alison’s children died — spread across the States. When Sarah asked her mum to come and live with them, Mary’s grandsons, Tommy, 13, and Ryan, 12, agreed they would share a room again so Mary could have her own space. She brought her dachshunds, Clyde and Daisy, with her from California and they sit at her feet in the kitchen, staring up at her as she talks.
‘She has been through the mill, this last year,’ says Sarah when she gets back from the school where she teaches. Mary’s years of competing have gradually caught up with her.
She had both hips replaced as well as one of her knees. She still radiates the kind of light and energy that powered her when she was younger but she is aware of her physical limitations.
Earlier, when we go down to the lake so the photographer can take Mary’s picture on the beach with the mountains for a backdrop, she whispers conspiratorially.
‘I hope he doesn’t ask me to jump in the air and wave my hands like they used to do when they wanted to photograph me,’ she says.
None of it has made her dwell on the past. There are no pictures of any of her feats in the house. The idea that her life should become a shrine to something she did more than 50 years ago is anathema to her. Her grandsons are aware of what she achieved — ‘ We’re
One paper called her ‘Marilyn Monroe on spikes’, while Mick Jagger told a pop magazine she’d be his dream date
lucky that she’s our grandma,’ says Tommy when he gets home from school — but it is hardly a daily topic of conversation.
Mary laughs again when we pore over a British Pathe newsreel shot before she went to Tokyo. It shows her arriving on a scooter at the Guinness headquarters in London, where she worked in the post room. ‘ I rode all over London on that Lambretta,’ she says.
The voiceover seems particularly dated and patronising now. ‘Mary is a pleasant girl,’ the sonorous voice of the narrator intones as footage shows her sitting in a chair, sewing. It was a different world when equality was an even more distant dream than it is now. ‘It was just the way they did it then,’ says Mary. ‘It was the way it was.’
She had been one of the favourites to win gold in the long jump at the Rome Olympics in 1960 but lost her run-up and ran straight through the pit on a couple of her jumps. She was such a fine athlete that she was pushed into the 80m hurdles where she finished fourth. She ran in the 4x100m relay, too, and the team were well-placed in the final when they dropped the baton.
‘In Rome, for me, it was flop, flop, flop,’ says Mary. ‘It was just one of those occasions where everything went wrong. You just have to deal with it. I got married not long after those Games and had my daughter, Alison, then I competed at the European Games when she was four months old. I didn’t fi nd it a problem coming back after the birth. And I didn’t really feel any pressure going to Tokyo. The press were talking about whether I was going to mess up again but I didn’t really think about it. I took all that kind of stuff in my stride. I had photographers following me everywhere in those days when I was living and training in England and if I sneezed, it was news, but it didn’t bother me.
‘I knew all the newspaper guys back then, reporters like Neil Allen, and I enjoyed talking to them. People said I interviewed well and I think that’s because I was an open book. I never knew an enemy.
‘It was different back then. We didn’t get paid for competing, for a start. There was no sponsorship money. The only thing I was allowed to do one time was get my hair done.
It was ridiculous. But there was great camaraderie within the team.’
When they got to Tokyo, Mary shared a room with Packer and Mary Peters in the women’s Olympic Village. She was already a mother by then so made sure their living quarters were neat and tidy.
‘I guess I was a bit of a neat-freak,’ she says. ‘Mum and dad had a council house in Wells. We didn’t have a lot. Maybe that’s why.
‘Tokyo was amazing. I loved their way of life in Japan. They were so polite and pleasant. It will go down as one of the best Games ever, though it did rain a lot.
‘The morning I woke up for my long jump final, there were hailstones and it was a cinder track. It was hailing when we went to the stadium and I thought we were back in England.
‘They were horrible conditions but I think they would say now that I was “in the zone”. I set a world record [6.76 metres], against the wind. On five of my six jumps, I beat the Olympic record.
‘When I realised I’d won, it was relief and joy. It happens so quickly and you are up on the podium and you wish you could go back and do it again.
‘I was thrilled for my coach and for my mum and dad. That was the big thing for me: four years before, mum and dad had been interviewed by ITV, asking if I was going to do it and then I flopped in Rome.
‘Four years later, I went back and I was married and had a daughter and Ann won and Lynn Davies won gold in the men’s long jump and Ken Matthews won in the 20km race walking, so my gold medal was the icing on the cake.’
Mary might have won double gold in Tokyo but she was beaten into second place in the pentathlon by Irina Press, a Soviet athlete whose gender was the subject of much speculation throughout her career.
Along with her sister Tamara, Irina withdrew abruptly from international competition in 1966 when chromosome testing was introduced a n d never com- peted again. ‘Some of the media called t hem “t he Press Brothers”, ’ s ays Mary, ‘ but I don’t remember thinking it was unfair that I should have to compete against them at the time. We didn’t know much then about the regimes in the Eastern Bloc.
‘I still don’t feel any bitterness towards them. If anything, I feel sorry for them that they were made to undergo treatment like that.’
She wonders now whether some of the hip and knee surgeries she has undergone are a result of her career.
Mary was a natural but competing in a multi-discipline event like the pentathlon, as well as long jump and sprinting, put a strain on her body that it is feeling now. It was one of the reasons she retired at the age of 28.
‘I did so many events,’ she says, ‘ and I started at 11 and went through to 25 or 26 before injuries ruined everything. I was over after Tokyo, really. I’d done everything. It felt as if I had achieved what I wanted to achieve. I just didn’t have the same mental discipline. I’d won the gold. People told me to go on but I didn’t have the desire after that.
‘I was the first one in the British team to win a gold medal in Tokyo and people said it inspired everybody. I didn’t realise that but I think some people thought: “Mary can do it so we can do it”.
‘Some time later, we went to Buckingham Palace for a ceremony. We wore our medals and there was a long hallway and it was lined with soldiers looking very serious and standing to attention. I was the last one with my three medals around my neck and as I was walking, the medals were bouncing and clinking together and this one soldier started smiling. I thought: “I got him”.’
If she had stayed in England, she thinks she would have gone into c o a c h i n g . O r s h e mi g h t h a v e
become a model. She was on the brink of signing for an agency, she says, when she left for the States to live with Toomey in Santa Barbara.
She has been back to the UK only intermittently since and when the authorities in Wells, where she grew up, wanted to organise a parade for her before the 2012 London Olympics, she hesitated to agree.
‘I thought nobody would know who the hell I was,’ she says. ‘What I did in Tokyo was so long ago. I thought it would be embarrassing. But they assured me that it would be OK and that people would be interested and they did a big parade and gave me the freedom of the city and hundreds of people turned up. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
‘It was my family, people I grew up with. They had this big banquet. It was wonderful. There’s a kind of monument to me in the market place in Wells, too. It’s a life-size record of my world record jump in Tokyo. My mum used to sit on the ledge of a shop window nearby so she could watch people looking at it.’
A couple of days ago, I spoke to Mary on the phone. She’s sitting in her room at Sarah’s house. She is part-amused, partalarmed that Samantha has sent her a face mask in the post. Austin’s is still doing takeaway food, she says. Diamond Peak and everything else in Incline Village has been closed for a while.
They had a snowstorm a couple of weeks back but there is no one on the slopes any more.
‘We are hanging in there,’ she says. ‘When Sarah was working, at least I could do stuff around the house to help out but she’s working from home now. We’re all self-isolating. God bless all those health workers.’
She has seen the news about the Olympics being postponed.
‘It was the right thing to do,’ she says, ‘but it’s tough for athletes who have trained so hard for so long and had tailored everything towards being ready for this summer.
‘Everybody’s health is all that matters, really but for some of the athletes, the postponement will be hard to take.’
Mary has no plans to travel to Japan if the Games do take place there next year. Ann Packer, now Ann Brightwell, has been invited to attend and they speak regularly on the phone.
‘She says I can travel with her as her plus one,’ says Mary, laughing, ‘but at the moment, I’m just trying to make sure I don’t get this virus. I’m not ready to go just yet.’
Frozen in our minds as the Golden Girl of the Tokyo Olympics, Mary’s own ideas of timelessness have changed now. The lake, she says, looks every bit as beautiful as it did when I was there in the winter.