Robbie Brightwell
Sprinter who won Olympic silver in Tokyo in 1964 and cheered on his fiancée Ann Packer to gold
ROBBIE BRIGHTWELL, the Olympic athlete, who has died aged 82, was, with his then fiancée, Ann Packer, one half of the “Golden Couple” of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
Brightwell, a 24-year-old teacher, was captain of the Great Britain team, and he and Ann Packer – attractive, in love and each expected to win 400 metres gold – made headlines when they arrived at the games. In a memoir published in 2011, Brightwell described them as “the Posh and Becks of Yesteryear” – the differences being that Ann Packer generally smiled for the photographers, and that their athletic careers were run on a shoestring.
The background to the Games was fraught, however. The team had fallen out with what Brightwell called the “bloody ham-handed” British Amateur Athletic Board, which had flown the athletes to Tokyo in second class, having already refused them a share of the fees from television coverage of their self-financed training camp at Timsbury Manor in Hampshire.
When most of the athletes boycotted the television programme Brightwell bore the brunt of the board’s disapproval and overheard Jack Crump, secretary of the Board, offer his captaincy to another athlete. “I was bloody upset,” he recalled. “There I was, the captain, and people at the highest level were planning to throw me out. I went out on the track and had a good sob.”
None the less, in Tokyo his hopes of winning gold in the 400 metres were boosted by his semi-final victory in a UK record-equalling 45.75sec. But in the final he ran too fast over the first 200m and then began to fade, eventually finishing fourth.
Ann Packer was watching the race with David Coleman in the BBC studio. “She was going to do a summary because Robbie was pretty certain to get a medal,” Coleman told The Daily Telegraph. “When he finished fourth it was so unexpected that she started crying and I couldn’t put her on. She was in full flood, mascara running down her face, and she said, ‘Never mind David, I’ll get a gold for Robbie tomorrow.’ And so she did.”
Ann Packer had run her 400m final and she too had been disappointed, pipped to the line by Betty Cuthbert, the Australian star. A story later went the rounds that she thought she might call it a day and skip the 800m final (for which she had been the second slowest qualifier) in order to go shopping, though as she recalled, “mentally I was very down, and people assure me I said it, but there was never a real chance I would have missed the final.”
Spurred on by her fiancé’s disappointment, Ann Packer not only won her gold – in an event in which she had never previously competed internationally – but did so in a world record time of 2min 1.1sec.
Having just finished his 4x400m relay semi-final, Brightwell hid behind a crash barrier to watch. As Ann crossed the line, “Alongside me, Milkha Singh [the Indian athlete, who the previous day had told her she was going to win] was jumping up and down like a jack-in-a-box shouting Hindi exhortations,” he wrote later. “Then, instead of triumphantly bedecking herself in the national flag and circling the stadium, acknowledging the crowd’s accolades, [Ann] chose to run to trackside to kiss and embrace her fiancé.”
He ran a brilliant anchor leg in the 4x400m final, picking up the baton in fourth behind Trinidad, Jamaica and the USA. In a superhuman effort over the last 50 metres he passed Trinidad and Jamaica and the crowd rose to cheer him as he delivered silver – and a European record of 3:01.6.
Brightwell was credited with having so improved the performance of the British team with heavy training schedules that they delivered the best Olympic performance of the modern era – four golds, seven silvers and one bronze, coming third in the classic track and field events behind the US and Russian teams. The enthusiasm of the British team, noted a Telegraph editorial, “owed much to Robbie Brightwell”.
After her 800m victory Ann Packer, hailed as “the White Rose of Tokyo”, announced that her ambition was to marry her fiancé and “be a good housewife”. They married just before Christmas that year, the bride declaring that “the emotions I had when I won a gold medal did not compare with how I feel today,” and embarked on a motoring tour of England for their honeymoon.
They were both appointed MBE in the 1965 New Year’s honours list. “It was a story of the times,” Brightwell reflected. “We were in love. It caught the imagination.”
Robert Ian Brightwell was born in Rawalpindi, in what was then British India (now Pakistan), on October 27 1939. The family returned to Britain in 1946 and he was brought up in Donnington, Shropshire.
As a Shropshire schoolboy Brightwell took gold in the English Schools Championships 220 yards, an event in which he competed at the 1958 Commonwealth Games. He made his Olympic debut in Rome in 1960, reaching the 400m semi-finals – setting a UK record of 46.1 – and taking part in the 4x400m relay.
In 1962 he won the Amateur Athletics Association 440 yards title in 45.9, which, as it was equivalent to 45.6 for 400m, set a European record only 0.2 sec outside the world mark. At the European Championships in Belgrade that year he claimed 400m gold and 4 x 400m silver, as well as silver in both races at the Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia; an attack of dysentery on the eve of the 440 yards final probably denied him the gold.
He retired after the Tokyo Olympics to become a sportsmaster at Tiffin Boys’ School in Surrey, and later a lecturer at Loughborough College.
He then moved into business, and as a director of Adidas UK and, later, Le Coq Sportif, became involved in sports sponsorship. The double Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson recalled Brightwell giving him his first box of free shoes: “I felt like a king, still get goosebumps thinking about it.” He also set up a fishing-tackle business.
Even after his retirement in 2002, Brightwell and his wife would still run together regularly from their home in Cheshire, and he remained immensely proud of her achievement in 1964. “Ann’s win marked a revolution in women’s distance running because for the first time the 800m became a sprint event,” he told The Times in 2020. “People... forget the 800m was the longest distance for women in those days. Ann showed you could sweat and still have grace and femininity.”
In 2019, 10 years after his wife, Robbie Brightwell was inducted into the England Athletics Hall of Fame.
The couple had three sons. When the first, Gary, was born within a year of their wedding, his proud father gave him a miniature pair of track shoes. Though his mother reportedly regarded him as the most athletically gifted of her sons, he became a businessman, choosing to pursue his running purely for pleasure.
His brothers Ian and David became footballers, playing for Manchester City.
Brightwell’s wife and sons survive him.