Betty Cuthbert wins the 1964 Olympic 400m final (© Getty Images)
Betty Cuthbert called it “the race in which I ran out of athletics and into history”.
The race in question was a momentous event in itself: the first Olympic 400m final for women, held on the reddish-brown cinder track of Tokyo’s National Stadium on 17 October 1964.
Cuthbert lined up in lane two. Just as in Melbourne eight years previously, the Australian sprinter was considered to be an outsider.
Back in 1956, she had bought tickets to watch the Olympic track and field action on home ground – before making the Australian team and emerging as the host nation’s golden girl.
Just 18, the unheralded Betty Cuthbert won the 100m and 200m ahead of East Germany’s Christa Stubnick and anchored the Australian 4x100m quartet to victory in world record time of 44.9.
Persistent foot injury prior to Tokyo
In Tokyo, at 26, Cuthbert was two years into a competitive comeback, following a premature retirement that had been prompted by injury and an aversion to the limelight.
As the eight contenders got to their marks for that inaugural Olympic women’s 400m final, the spotlight was not on the former double sprint champion from Sydney but on the burgeoning British quarter-miler Ann Packer.
Betty Cuthbert (468) wins the 1956 Olympic 100m title (© Getty Images)
In the absence of world record holder Sin Kim Dan, North Korea having been banned because of their participation in the unsanctioned Games of the New Emerging Forces, Packer advanced through the rounds as the overwhelming favourite.
The 22-year-old Briton won her heat in 53.1. Cuthbert placed third in hers in a modest 56.0.
Drawn together in the same semifinal – their first direct confrontation in a major championship – Packer finished comfortably clear in 52.7, with Cuthbert a distant runner-up in 53.8.
The Sydneysider showed further glimpses of her old golden girl deeds with world record 440 yards times of 53.5 and 53.3 in 1963 (two of the 16 global marks she set during her career) but her form leading into the Tokyo Olympics had been undermined by a persistent foot injury.
The form through the rounds in the Japanese capital strongly suggested that Packer was the woman to beat in the final.
But Cuthbert proceeded to defeat her, shooting into the lead, building a three-metre advantage into the wind down the back-straight and holding her form down the home straight to prevail in 52.0.
The distraught Packer took little consolation in the silver medal and a European record, 52.2, but three days later won the 800m in 2:01.01, a world record.
Cuthbert missed Sin’s official 400m world record by 0.1 but gained not just a place in track and field history as the first Olympic women’s 400m champion but also as the first athlete to win Olympic gold medals at 100m, 200m and 400m.
Sixty years on, she remains the only sprinter – male or female – to have achieved that considerable hat-trick.
“It’s the one perfect race I’ve ever run,” Cuthbert reflected. “It’s also the hardest.
“In Melbourne, everything came easily to me. I was much younger and things happened without me realising it.
“But I wanted the one in Tokyo more than anything. It sealed my fate in athletics.
“I’d made up my mind that if I won, I’d never run again.”
Ditching retirement to win fourth Olympic gold
Cuthbert finished her athletics career with a place alongside Fanny Blankers-Koen by becoming the second female track and field athlete to win four Olympic gold medals.
Betty Cuthbert wins the 200m at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 (© Getty images)
She started it as a protégé of June Ferguson – who won Olympic silver as Australia’s second leg runner when Blankers-Koen claimed her fourth gold as the anchor woman in the 4x100m at the London Olympics in 1948.
The PE teacher at Parramatta Home Science, and women’s coach at the Western Suburbs Athletics Club in Sydney, the former June Maston spotted the raw potential in the 13-year-old Cuthbert.
She never managed to curb Cuthbert’s habit of running with her mouth wide open but maximised the benefits of her charge’s natural high knee lift and long, raking stride.
Diffident by nature, Cuthbert suffered under the glare of the public spotlight that her 1956 Olympic successes attracted.
She announced her retirement after only reaching the 100m quarter-finals in her injury-hampered 1960 Olympic appearance in Rome and spent the next 14 months concentrating on her work at her father’s nursery business, and on breeding and selling budgerigars.
Cuthbert dusted down her spikes after hearing a voice in her head repeatedly urging her to ‘run again’. “Somehow, I realised it was God speaking to me,” she said.
After retiring for good, Cuthbert’s religious faith sustained her through 40 years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. She died in 2017, aged 79, her place in track and field posterity assured.
In 2012, the darling of the Melbourne Olympics was in Barcelona for the centennial celebrations of World Athletics when the fastest man in history came across the room to meet her.
As the Australian journalist Peter Fitzsimmons related: “Usain Bolt… came across, bowed, touched Betty tenderly on the shoulder and exclaimed, ‘Four Olympic gold medals and 16 world records…Wow! You sure could run…!’”
On 2 December 2018, Cuthbert along with Blankers-Koen was honoured as one of the inaugural dozen recipients of the World Athletics Heritage Plaque, awarded in the posthumous category of ‘Legend’.
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage
