Fanny Blankers-Koen

Athlete

• Born: April 26, 1918
• Birthplace: Baarn, the Netherlands
• Died: January 25, 2004
• Place of death: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Sport: Track and field (sprints, jumps, and pentathlon)

Early Life

Francina Elaje Koen, or “Fanny,” was born in Baarn, the Netherlands, on April 26, 1918. Her father had not inherited any land and was a tenant farmer. When Fanny was five, her father moved the family to Hoofddorp, where he established a transportation business. Fanny had two older and two younger brothers. She joined a gymnastics group at the age of six; also, she swam, skated, and ran better than most of the boys in town. She joined the Amsterdam Dames’ Athletic Club at sixteen. At 5 feet 9 inches and approximately 135 pounds as an adult, she had the size to succeed as an athlete. However, in the 1930’s, few women made sports a career; home and family were the accepted goals.

The Road to Excellence

In the summer of 1935, Fanny began competitive running. When she upset a known runner in an 800-meter race, Jan Blankers—a former athlete who was an Amsterdam police officer and a coach of young athletes—believed Fanny had a future in track even though her running form was not satisfactory. Fanny was included on the Dutch team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where she tied for sixth in the high jump with a leap of 5 feet 1 inch. Blankers took over Fanny’s training and honed her natural athletic skills. In the 1938 European championships, Fanny finished third in the 100 meters with a time of 12.0 seconds. Under Blankers’s direction, Fanny also practiced the long jump, high jump, and hurdles.

Blankers and Fanny were married in August, 1940. They moved into an apartment ten minutes from Amsterdam’s Olympia Stadium. A son was soon born. Fanny’s training program consisted of two days of workouts each week, a considerable contrast to the regimen of modern athletes but typical for that era. The children accompanied Fanny to her training sessions, and the rest of the time, she was a housewife, committed to her home and family. Her training continued even after the Netherlands was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940, but international track and field competition was suspended because of the war. It appeared that Fanny’s best years as an athlete had been lost.

The Emerging Champion

In 1946, Fanny returned to international competition, seven months after the birth of her second son. At the European championships, held in Oslo, Norway, she fell in the 100 meters, but she was victorious in the 80-meter hurdles and anchored the Netherlands’ relay team to victory.

The 1948 Olympic Games, the first since Berlin in 1936, took place in London. British newspapers claimed that Fanny, thirty years of age and the oldest woman in the track and field events, was too old to succeed against Olympic-level competition. Fanny had her own doubts; she wagered with her father that she would not win a single event. According to Fanny, even the Dutch public was not very supportive, and she was criticized for appearing in public in running shorts and not staying at home to care for her children. Blankers accompanied Fanny to London as coach of the Netherlands track team. Fanny’s accomplishments silenced the doubters.

In seven days, she ran eleven different races, including preliminaries and finals. She won all of them. Her first victory was in the 100 meters with a time of 11.9 seconds. Two days later, in the 80-meter hurdles, she got a poor start and trailed most of the field over the first hurdle, but her sprinting speed between the hurdles allowed her to cross the line first, in a photo finish, with a time of 11.2 seconds. Two days later, she won the 200 meters by a margin of 6 yards over the second-place finisher, in 24.4 seconds. She achieved a fourth gold medal as the anchor for the Dutch women’s 4 100 relay team. Her four gold medals were unprecedented for a woman and tied Jesse Owens’s 1936 gold-medal count.

When she returned home her neighbors gave her a bicycle so she did not have to run so much. A four-horse carriage conveyed her and her family from the Amsterdam railroad station to the town hall, where she was received by the lord mayor. She found it overwhelming, as all she did was run fast. Her true profession was homemaker.

Continuing the Story

The homemaker continued running in Europe, as well as in Australia and North America. In the 1950 European championships, held in Brussels, Belgium, Fanny won the same three individual races she had in the London Olympiad. During her spectacular career she set world records in the 80-meter hurdles, the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints, the high jump, the long jump, and the pentathlon, the last at the age of thirty-three.

Summary

During her time, Fanny Blankers-Koen dominated women’s track and field. Her world records were surpassed, but her place among seminal women athletes was cemented with her 1948 Olympic performance. In 1980, she was admitted to the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. The Track and Field News poll placed her fifth among the top women athletes of the century, and in 1999, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) selected Fanny as co-athlete of the century. Fanny died in 2004.

Bibliography

Litsky, Frank. “Fanny Blankers-Koen, Star of ’48 Olympics, Dies at Eighty-five.” The New York Times, January 26, 2004, p. B7.

Smith, Lissa, ed. Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2001.

Woolum, Janet. Outstanding Women Athletes: Who They Are and How They Influenced Sports in America. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1998.