Supported by
By Jeré Longman
The latest article from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, recounts the Austerity Olympics, the first Games to take place in 12 years and the track-and-field star who changed the perception of women’s athletics.
When the Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen appeared at the 1948 London Olympics, soon to become the first woman to win four gold medals at a single Games, she was not the only welcomed and urgent arrival from the Netherlands.
A hundred tons of fruit and vegetables were also sent from the Low Countries to help feed Dutch and other athletes in a still-battered city during the first Summer Olympics held after World War II. Finland provided timber for the basketball court. Switzerland donated gymnastics equipment. Canada felled two Douglas firs to make diving boards.
The Austerity Olympics, they were nicknamed. They represented a renewal of the world’s biggest sporting event following the wartime cancellation of the Winter and Summer Games of 1940 and 1944 — a disruption deadlier and longer than a yearlong postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was a liberation of spirit to be there in London,” the great Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek, who won four cumulative gold medals at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, later said of the moment. “After those dark days of the war, the bombing, the killing and the starvation, the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out.”
Still, much of London remained devastated by the Blitz. Some critics saw the Olympics as an obscene waste in a nearly bankrupt Britain. But the government lent its support to signal postwar rejuvenation and to secure the desperate lifeline of hard currency from foreign tourists.
There was no money to build arenas or housing. Running events were held on a greyhound track covered with tons of cinders from fireplaces. Athletes were housed in military camps, college dormitories and schools. Many competitors made their own uniforms.
Food rationing was still in effect, and while Olympians received more rations than the average person — the same amount as dockworkers and coal miners — some British athletes supplemented their diets with the protein of whale meat.
This spirit of improvisation, rebirth and remarkable change was most notably embodied by the star of the Games, Blankers-Koen, whose success undermined stereotypes about women competing vigorously in sports and inspired track and field’s world governing body to name her its greatest female athlete of the 20th century.
“Almost single-handedly she transformed women’s athletics from a sideshow into a central feature of future Olympics,” Janie Hampton wrote in “The Austerity Olympics,” a history of the 1948 London Games.
In an era of amateurism, Blankers-Koen was a rarity. It was difficult for any athlete to sustain an Olympic career across multiple Games when the ability to earn money from sport was prohibited. But she persevered through a gap of 12 years as the world went to war. Fanny Koen (pronounced COON), unmarried at the time, competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as an 18-year-old, finishing tied for sixth in the high jump and fifth with the Netherlands’ 4×100-meter relay team. She met the great African-American sprinter Jesse Owens, who subverted Hitler’s notion of Aryan supremacy. In awe of his four gold medals, she asked for his autograph and had a drink with him, she told me in an interview in 2000.
“I thought it must be nice to have just one medal,” she said at the time.
Eventually, she would match Owens’s haul of four gold medals, but not before an interruption of more than a decade. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Although the country was occupied, some domestic sports competitions continued. Koen trained intermittently but still set a handful of world records and married her coach, Jan Blankers, who had competed in the triple jump at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. They had a son, Jan Jr., and, when food became scarce, they survived on potatoes and watery milk from an uncle who had a farm.
“People were being taken away, and friends of mine in the underground were shot, and people were hungry and were in the streets begging for food,” she told The Times in 1982.
At war’s end, Blankers-Koen had a daughter, also named Fanny. For many women of that era, one child, much less two, would have meant the end of their athletic careers. But Blankers-Koen persisted, consulting her doctor, who told her, “You are breastfeeding, but try it.”
She did and, she told me, “I had more and more food for the girl than before.”
As her nickname “The Flying Housewife” suggested, Blankers-Koen accommodated her training to her domestic responsibilities, working out twice a week, for two hours at a time, and only on Saturday afternoons during the winter. She was said to have pedaled to practice with her two children in a bicycle basket. While she ran and jumped, they played in the sand of the long-jump pit.
Blankers-Koen arrived at the 1948 London Olympics at age 30. By some accounts, she was also three months pregnant. Of the nine track-and-field events for women, she won four: the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 80-meter hurdles and the 4×100-meter relay. She might have won five or six gold medals if athletes had not been restricted to three individual events. The winning distance in the long jump, for instance, fell nearly two feet short of her world record.
Despite her unmatched accomplishments, many questioned Blankers-Koen’s presence in London. She received letters, she told me, saying that she was too old and “that it was not good to be running if you had a baby, that you should do the housekeeping rather than running in shorts in a stadium.”
Even after women’s track and field was introduced at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, cultural dismissiveness and pseudoscience persisted for decades. Women were considered too fragile. Sweaty exertions were too masculine, could prevent women from becoming mothers or might even cause the uterus to fall out. Not until 1984 in Los Angeles was a women’s marathon included in the Olympics.
But in London — the inaugural Olympics broadcast on home television and the first filmed for theaters in Technicolor — here came fierce repudiation of obstructive convention in the insistent stride of Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old mother of two wearing a short-sleeved white top and homemade orange shorts, her blond hair swept back like a windsock by her unrivaled speed.
“They were not used to it,” Blankers-Koen told me of her detractors, “but I was not listening to them. I did what I wanted to do.”
Of the 4,073 participants in the 1948 London Olympics, only 393 were women. But they confirmed the capability of women who had taken the jobs of men absent during the war and reflected enormous societal change to come. Alice Coachman of the United States, winner of the high jump, became the first Black woman to win a gold medal. And Blankers-Koen appeared in bold headlines, remembers the journalist Roger Robinson, then a boy of 9 living in London who attended some of the track events.
“It was always ‘the Dutch Housewife and mother of two,’” said Robinson, the author of “When Running Made History.” “I suppose it was stereotyping, but she was praised and admired. She showed that a woman and a mother could be an Olympic superstar.”
Blankers-Koen won the 100 meters on a muddy track, launching herself with a device that was new to the Olympics, the starting block. In the 80-meter hurdles, she clipped the fifth of eight barriers, then leaned so desperately at the finish that the tape cut her neck and left droplets of blood on her shirt.
The stadium band began playing “God Save the King,” and Blankers-Koen thought she had lost the event to her British rival, Maureen Gardner. But the band was serenading the entrance of the British royal family, not Gardner, and Blankers-Koen was declared the victor in a photo finish.
Before a preliminary round of the 200 meters, Blankers-Koen was exhausted from the concentration required to run so many races. And she missed her children, who had remained in the Netherlands. In a tearful conversation with Blankers, her coach and husband, she said she wanted to withdraw from the Games.
As Blankers-Koen recalled to me, he told her: “It is not necessary for me that you are running. But if you don’t run, I’m sure you will be sorry for it later on.”
Feeling renewed, she won the 200 meters by seven-tenths of a second — still the widest margin at any Olympics — and reached the finish line with her head back, so relaxed that her eyes seemed closed.
One event remained, the 4×100-meter relay. Blankers-Koen nearly missed the race, having gone shopping for a raincoat. Running the anchor leg, she took the baton in fourth place, five yards behind the leader, but prevailed at the tape.
In an oral history of the Games, Blankers-Koen said disparaging comments by Jack Crump, the manager of the British track and field team who dismissed Blankers-Koen as “too old to make the grade,” had angered and motivated her. “Too old was I?” she said. “I would show them.”
When Blankers-Koen arrived back in Amsterdam, she rode through the streets in a carriage pulled by four horses. Her neighbors gave her a bicycle, David Wallechinsky wrote in “The Complete Book of the Olympics,” so she wouldn’t “have to run so much.”
She participated in a third Olympics, the 1952 Helsinki Games, but, bothered by painful boils, she stopped running the hurdles race after striking the first two barriers. It was her last major international competition.
In 2003, a half-century after Blankers-Koen retired, the journalist Kees Koman published a biography — the Dutch title translates to “A Queen With Man’s Legs” — which presented a more complicated portrait of the Olympic star as distant, insecure and consumed with success. Her daughter was quoted as saying, “I think my mother never loved herself and, the other way around, she could not give love and friendship herself to other people.” And: “My mother only enjoyed herself when she was being worshiped.”
She died a year later, on Jan. 25, 2004, at age 85 from heart problems and Alzheimer’s disease. Blankers-Koen is not well known today, but three-quarters of a century after her triumphs in London, she remains the only female track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
“I find it difficult to think of anybody who made a bigger contribution to the development of women’s athletics,” said Sebastian Coe of Britain, the president of World Athletics, track’s governing body, and a two-time Olympic champion in the metric mile. “Or who made a broader impact on societal change, particularly around gender equity and diversity, both on and off the track.”
Jeré Longman, a sports reporter for The Times, has covered 13 Olympics and has reported on track and field for more than three decades.
Advertisement