"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."
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"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."
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"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’ 4x100-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."
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"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."
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"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.”"
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"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 4x100-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."
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"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."
