Paola Cacchi leads from Joyce Smith and Anne Garrett at the inaugural World Cross Country Championships (© Mark Shearman)
It was as Paola Cacchi that the Italian trailblazer who first made her name as Paola Pigni officially entered the history books on home ground in Monza 50 years ago.
The women’s 4km race at the second World Athletics Cross Country Championships at the Mirabello Racecourse in Monza Park on 16 March 1974 was the first occasion on which the one-time Milanese sprinter competed solely under her married name.
Since marrying her coach, Bruno Cacchi, in 1970, the multiple world record-breaker had raced as Paolo Pigni-Cacchi but chose to drop her maiden name as she prepared to defend her world cross country title on home ground.
At the age of 28, under the direction of her husband, a devotee of Arthur Lydiard’s training methods, she had long been established as a groundbreaking force in female middle-distance running.
First woman sub-4:30 at mile and sub-16 at 5000m
Between 1969 and 1973, Pigni-Cacchi had set eight world records at distances ranging from 1500m to 10,000m.
In July 1969, running in the classic floodlit La Notturna di Milano meeting in the Arena Napoleonica, she obliterated the world record figures for 1500m, clocking 4:12.4 ahead of the Dutch runner Maria Gommers, who finished 0.6 inside her old global mark in second place with 4:15.0.
Paola Pigni of Italy during the 1972 Olympic Games 1500m in Munich (© Getty Images)
The daughter of a renowned Milanese singer, she became the first woman to crack 16 minutes for 5000m in September that year, clocking 15:53.6 in her home city to eclipse the 16:17.4 world record she had set in Formia four months previously.
In August 1973, as Paola Pigni-Cacchi, she was the first woman to break 4:30 for the mile, clocking 4:29.5, again on Italian soil in Viareggio.
In the championship arena, having started her career as Italian 400m champion in 1965, she reached the 800m semifinals at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 and won European 1500m bronze in Athens in 1969, finishing behind Czechoslovakia’s Jaroslava Jehlickova and Gommers.
Then, in Munich in 1972, Pigni-Cacchi graduated to global podium status on the track. In the inaugural Olympic women’s 1500m final, she secured the bronze medal behind the Soviet Lyudmila Bragina and Gunhild Hoffmeister of East Germany. She improved her Italian record in all three rounds, with times of 4:09.53, 4:07.83 and 4:02.85, which remained her PB.
She was a mother by then, having given birth to daughter Chiara in 1971.
International and world cross country winner
On the country, the familiar figure on the start line in Monza in 1974 had also made a global mark.
In March 1970 she won the 3km women’s race at the International Cross Country Championships in Vichy, finishing 0.8 ahead of the Pole Zofia Kolakowska. At an alternative event held in Frederick, Maryland, the next day, Doris Brown of the USA won the fourth of five consecutive international cross country titles.
When the International Cross Country Championships, or Cross de Nations, came under the umbrella of the IAAF, the forerunner of World Athletics, in 1973, there was no disputing the first official women’s world cross country champion in 1973.
That honour fell to Pigni-Cacchi. At the Waregem Hippodrome in the west of Belgium, she was too strong for her rivals in the 4km women’s race, winning by 60m from England’s Joyce Brown. Doris Brown, nursing an injury, finished 39 seconds behind in 15th place.
And so to Monza in 1974…
First up at the 1974 World Cross Country Championships was the junior men’s race. Venanzio Ortis carried big hopes of home gold into the 7100m event but had to settle for silver after a gripping three-way battle with the bespectacled Rich Kimball of the USA, who sprinted clear in the last 400m, and Ireland’s John Treacy, who wound up third.
The women’s 4km race came next at the Mirabella Racecourse. The English duo of Rita Ridley and Ann Yeoman were the early leaders but when Cacchi made her move only Finland’s Nina Holmen could keep in touch - though not for very long. The Italian finished six seconds clear in 12:42.
It was a historic achievement by the Milanese woman. Cacchi became the first athlete to retain an IAAF world title – and the first runner to secure back-to-back official world (as opposed to international) cross country titles
She also had the satisfaction of claiming silver in the team competition, the Italians finishing second to England’s 28 points with a haul of 50.
Paola Pigni, John Walker, Filbert Bayi and Sebastian Coe at the World Athletics Heritage Mile Night in Monaco (© Philippe Fitte)
‘A source of inspiration’
In the final race of the day, Belgian Eric De Beck – a protege of 1964 Olympic steeplechase champion Gaston Roelants – took the senior men’s crown.
Franco Fava was the first Italian home, in eighth place. After finishing eighth in the Olympic marathon in Montreal in 1974, he has proceeded to become a long-time chronicler of Italian track and field as athletics correspondent of the national daily newspaper Corriere dello Sport.
“Paola was the female pioneer of long distance running in Italy and around the world, going back to the end of the 1960s,” Fava maintains.
“On 31 December 1971 she was the first woman in Italy to officially complete a full marathon, running 3:00:01. For this, she was awarded the title ‘revolutionary of women’s running.’
“She was a source of inspiration for Gabriella Dorio, Olympic gold medallist for Italy in the 1500m at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
“In 2019 she was among the great milers of the past honoured by Seb Coe at the World Athletics Heritage Mile Night ceremony in Monaco.”
Sadly, two years after that grand celebration in Monte Carlo, Pigni-Cacchi collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of 75. She had been attending a gathering of Italian track and field greats at the Castel Porziano in the presence of the Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
“Paola was the forerunner of our middle-distance champions,” proclaimed Stefano Mei, president of the Italian Athletics Federation and 1986 European 10,000m champion.
“Her bronze medal at the Munich Olympics in 1972 had an enormous impact. It was worth gold, because at the time women’s sport was not yet as developed as it is today.
“Paola was the pioneer of great athletics, an example for many athletes, both of her generation and subsequently. Her memory will be honoured.”
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage
