Sport
The flying housewife
by Joseph Romanos
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“I started late. I joined a club in Amsterdam when I was about 16. Before that, I’d been a swimmer. But we had a lot of good swimmers and not many so good at track and field, so I decided to do athletics more seriously.
“In 1936 I was too young. But I believe I would have been at my peak in 1940. The Olympics were to be in Tokyo, but were cancelled because of the war. That was a big disappointment for me. Ever since Berlin, I’d dreamed of standing on an Olympic rostrum with a medal.
“Of course, when the war started, we had no idea how long it would last. When it finally finished, our house was full of wheat and grain. You needed it because there was no meat and you never knew when the grain would stop coming.
“When the war was going, my chances for athletics were not so big, though I was at my peak. I didn’t train much. In the summer, I trained twice a week and competed on Sundays in small meetings. In the winter, I did one hour of gymnastics – real gymnastics, not with weights – and on Saturday went down to the track when it was possible. But for more than a month in winter our track was covered in ice and was used for ice-skating. You didn’t train that month.”
During the war, Blankers-Koen set a number of world records and also started her family. She recalled breaking the world high jump record and breast-feeding her son Jan between jumps. She set world high jump, long jump, hurdles and sprint records from 1941-43. “By 1944 we really couldn’t compete. The war was just too bad. By then I thought my career was over. We had farmers in our family and through them I got more food than some, but not enough to train on.”
In 1946 her daughter, Fanny, was born, just six weeks before the European championships in Oslo, the first major athletics event for nearly a decade.
“That year I won five Dutch titles, but I didn’t think I could go to Oslo. It was too soon after Fanny was born. I had no condition. The officials talked to me and eventually I did go. I took Fanny with me in a basket to the side of the track. In Oslo, I won the hurdles and the relay and after that I looked forward to London.
“It wasn’t too hard for me. We didn’t train so much in those days.”
Blankers-Koen dominated the London Olympics. She edged out Gardner and Strickland in the hurdles, ran a wonderful last leg to earn Holland a relay gold medal ahead of the favoured Australians and completed the 100m-200m double. She was dubbed “the flying housewife”.
Though she continued to compete internationally for four years, it was asking a lot of a woman in her thirties to continue to dominate on such limited training. Eventually, a group of new stars, including New Zealand’s Yvette
Williams, arrived to break her records.
But no one doubted the class of Blankers-Koen. Imagine what she would have done if the heptathlon had been held in her day.
It all happened more than half a century ago, but she was one athlete whose fame and achievements lasted a lifetime.
World records set by Fanny Blankers-Koen
100 yards
11.0s 1938
10.8s 1944
100 metres
11.5s 1943
11.5s 1948
11.5s 1952
200 metres
24.2s 1950
24.0s 1950
80 metre hurdles
11.3s 1942
11.0s 1948
4 x 100m relay
48.8s 1944
47.4s 1948
4 x 200m relay
1min 41.0s 1944
High jump
1.67m 1943
1.69m 1943
1.71m 1943
Long jump
6.25m 1943
Pentathlon
4692 points 1951
IS THIS GOOD FOR RUGBY?
Another famous sports figure of a previous era to die recently was Vivian Jenkins, the slick Welsh fullback of the 1930s. Jenkins played in the Welsh team that beat the 1935-36 All Blacks. He later became a leading writer on the game, being the Sunday Times rugby correspondent for years.
Until a few years ago, he lived in Queenstown, though I notice that he died in Wales, at the age of 92.
The reason I mention him here is that playing for Wales against Ireland in 1934, he became the first fullback to score a try in test rugby.
The following day, the Western Mail of Cardiff ran two headlines over its match report. They were: “Was Jenkins Justified?” and “Is This Good for Rugby?”
How times have changed.
