Micheline Ostermeyer

Plaque name: Micheline Ostermeyer

Location: Vannes Council, Pl. Maurice Marchais, 56000 Vannes, France

Plaque awarded: 01/08/2024

Reason: Plaque Category (posthumous) – Legend

Micheline Ostermeyer (23 December 1922 - 17 October 2001) won three medals in London 1948. Her victories in the shot and discus and her bronze in the high jump were only surpassed in those Games by the four gold medals of the Flying Dutchwoman Fanny Blankers-Koen.

Ostermeyer holds the distinction of being France’s first female Olympic track & field medallist and lies second to Marie-José Pérec as being the most decorated French athletics Olympian.

Ostermeyer, who was a great grandniece of Victor Hugo, the poet, novelist, and dramatist, was a virtuoso concert pianist.

In fact her first love was music. This is not surprising as her mother Odette, a native of Vannes in Brittany, was a piano teacher and her maternal grandfather was the founder of the Vannes music conservatory.

She got her love of sport from her father Henri Ostermeyer and from her cousins Mady Moreau, a celebrated diver, and Georges Breitman a pole vaulter.

Under her mother’s guidance Ostermeyer began piano lessons aged 4-years-old and in 1936 at 14 she enrolled at the Paris Conservatory of Music. The outbreak of WWII curtailed her music studies and she left for Tunisia where her family were then based. It was there that she began to participate in sports especially track and field athletics and basketball.

Ostermeyer made her international debut in the 1946 European Championships in Oslo taking silver in the shot put. That year she also returned to the Paris Conservatory where she won first prize in piano. Thereafter for the next four years she managed her life between practising sports and music.

In the months leading-up to the 1948 London Olympics she prepared for the Games as a trainee at the French National Institute of Sports. During that time she was playing the piano on average for five hours a day and each evening, she would practise athletics for a couple of hours.

She was asked by the French Federation if she would consider also competing in the discus throw in London and took up the event just a few weeks before the Games.

A versatile athlete, Ostermeyer like Blankers-Koen was also a runner not ‘just’ a jumper and a thrower. In the 1950 European Championships in Brussels she took a bronze in the 80m hurdles as well as the shot put.

Ostermeyer retired following those championships having accumulated 13 French national titles across a variety of running, throwing, and jumping events.