Fanny Blankers-Koen shattered gender and age barriers at the Olympics

People said she was too old to compete, but then she won 4 Olympic Gold Medals

The Second World War forced a 12-year hiatus in the Olympics, but when the sporting calendar began its return to normality, at the London Games in 1948, Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen was the star. She entered four of the nine women's events (the maximum allowed under competition rules) and took gold in each, winning the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay and 80m hurdles, a race she is leading in this picture, and which she won on a photo-finish.

Among the nicknames given to Blankers-Koen in 1948 was ‘the flying housewife', a reference to the fact that she was 30 years old and married to the Dutch coach Jan Blankers, with whom she had two children (she was in fact pregnant with her third during the Games). This was unusual for the time, and Blankers-Koen had received hate mail in the Netherlands for competing rather than staying home with her children. Yet she showed the world conclusively that marriage and motherhood had no bearing on athletic brilliance. By the end of the Games, it was said that she was as well known to spectators as King George VI of England himself.

In addition to her Olympics titles, Blankers-Koen won European gold medals in 1946 and 1950, and for nearly eight years held simultaneous world records in the 80m hurdles, 100m, high jump and long jump. In 1999 she was voted by the International Athletics Federation as the greatest female athlete of the twentieth century.

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This is an excerpt from A Woman's World, my new book in collaboration with Dan Jones (

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