“I got very many bad letters,” she recalled, “people writing that I must stay home with my children.” Still, she qualified to return to the Olympics, leaving her children behind in Amsterdam. But because of the war, the Olympics were canceled that year and again in 1944. She’d won European titles and set multiple world records in the 80-meter hurdles, high jump and long jump.
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Photo: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid / NOSįanny was just coming into her prime as a runner when she married her coach, Jan Blankers, in 1940. The meeting was, she would later say, her most treasured Olympic memory.įanny Blankers-Koen was voted female athlete of the century in 1999 by the International Association of the Athletics Federations. She attended the Games, and although she did not medal in her events, she did manage to meet and get an autograph from her hero, the African-American track star Jesse Owens, whose record four gold medals she would later match in London.
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At 17 years old, Koen began competing in track events and set a national record in the 800-meter run a year later she qualified in the trials for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in both the high jump and the 4 x 100 relay. She also won four gold medals in track and field and became “as well known to Olympic patrons as King George of England.” Nicknamed the “ Flying Housewife,” Blankers-Koen achieved this feat while pregnant with her third child.īorn Francina Elsje Koen on April 26, 1918, in Lage Vuursche, a village in the Dutch province of Utrecht, she demonstrated remarkable athletic abilities as a young child and ultimately settled on track and field after her swim coach advised her that the Netherlands was already loaded with talent in the pools. Fanny Blankers-Koen of Holland, 6 feet tall and 30 years old, was a “shy, towering, drably domesticated” straw-blonde mother of a 7-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter who talked of how she liked cooking and housekeeping. Still, the London Games managed to set an Olympic attendance record, and an unlikely Olympic star emerged. (They’d already lodged a protest when officials declared that the state be designated “Eire” rather than Ireland, as the team had wished.) As it turned out, Eire would win just one medal at the Games, when 69-year-old Letitia Hamilton picked up a bronze medal for her painting of the Meath Hunt Point-to-Point Races in the Olympic art competition. There was a row when the International Swimming Federation declared that athletes from Northern Ireland could compete only for Great Britain, and the Irish withdrew from the swimming and diving competition in protest. A Korean weightlifter lost 14 pounds while in England, and the Jamaicans were extremely displeased and “kicking about the poorly seasoned foods.” Rumors of food poisoning ran rampant, as numerous athletes suffered debilitating stomach pains, but British public relations officers ascribed the incidents to “nervousness,” noting that doctors had detected “nothing more than a mild digestive disorder.” Still, English athletes chose to consume unrationed whale meat, and American reporters who arrived in advance hoped Uncle Sam might send enough steaks, eggs, butter and ham for everyone.Ī 57-year-old gymnastics official from Czechoslovakia became the first Olympic political defection when she refused to return to her Communist bloc nation following the Games. With postwar rationing still in effect, there were immediate complaints about the British food. London built no new facilities or stadiums for what were called the “Austerity Games.” Male athletes stayed in Royal Air Force barracks, while women were housed in college dormitories. Neither Germany nor Japan were invited, and the Soviet Union declined to participate, Stalin believing that sports had no place in communism. In 1948, after a 12-year hiatus from the Games, the sporting world hadn’t recovered, either. The last time London hosted the Olympics, the scarred city hadn’t yet recovered from the ravages of World War II. Fanny Blanker-Koen crosses the finish line to become the first triple champion of the 14th Olympic Games.