Yes, you read it correctly. Fanny Blankers-Koen was one of the greatest Dutch sportswomen of the 20th century. She made history at the Olympics and inspired generations of female athletes. Discover the inspiring story of Fanny Blankers-Koen: Olympic champion, record holder and pioneer in global sports history.
Every year around Christmas in the month of December, Dutch television broadcasts flashbacks, images from the past year, but also images from previous Dutch history and sports. These retrospectives cover various topics, such as politics, economics, but also men and women in sports. It is my habit to follow these broadcasts, sometimes indirectly, but very occasionally, images come along that I don’t want to miss, I think you know that yourself, television images of people from the past that continue to intrigue you. I often think, where exactly does this person come from, and where did the motivation come from to, in this case, be able to deliver those sports performances?
Fanny Blankers-Koen: Why does this Dutch sports legend remain so fascinating?
Fanny Blankers–Koen (1918-2004) is a well-known name by Dutch standards, but actually, this lady was called Francina Elsje Blankers-Koen. She was born on April 26, 1918, on the farm “De Brandenburg” in the village of Lage Vuursche next to the city of Baarn in the Dutch province of Utrecht. The Koens family soon moved to the Groningen town of Klein-Ulsda after her birth. In this village, the father of “Fanny” ran a farm for several years.
Why did Fanny Blankers-Koen’s family move back to the West of the Netherlands?
After the period in Klein-Ulsda, the Koen family moved back to the west of the Netherlands due to the bankruptcy of their father’s farm. The family found a new place to live in Hoofddorp, near the Dutch capital, Amsterdam. There in Hoofddorp, Fanny signed up at the age of eleven with the local gymnastiekvereniging.de youthful Fanny, was very quickly seen as a true natural talent. She excelled again and again in the weekly gymnastics lessons. Especially her perfectly executed “bird’s nests” on the rings soon became known throughout the Netherlands. Nobody realized then that Fanny would excel in the sports history of the forties and fifties.
Was Fanny Blankers-Koen first a gymnast before becoming an Olympic sprint champion?
Fanny not only excelled by her performance of the “bird’s nest” in the rings, but when there was running outside the gymnastics hall in the summer, Fanny always excelled in it. In addition, this lady also turned out to excel in the pool. The first sports medal that the young Fanny earned was in the swimming discipline of fifty meters freestyle. But funnily enough, this sporty lady also really enjoyed tennis and speed skating on the ice.
Why did Fanny Blankers-Koen choose athletics and not other sports?
You could say that Fanny had the talent to become a similar star to similar sports stars after her time, such as tennis players Chris Evert (1954 Fort Lauderdale) or Billy Jean King (1943 Long Beach), or to later skaters to East Germany’s Helga Haase (1934-1989 Obschernitzki), or Russia’s Lidia Skoblikova (1939 Chelyabinsk). Perhaps we would now compare her with the later swimmers Ada Kok (1947 Amsterdam), or Erica Terpstra (1943 The Hague) the later Dutch politician and television presenter. But Fanny limited herself to certain sports on the advice of her trainers at the time.
What sports did Fanny Blankers Koen practice, and why did she choose athletics?
At the age of sixteen, Fanny signed up as a member of the Amsterdam Women’s Athletics Club ADA. Already in that first year on September 22, 193, she was not yet seventeen years young, Fanny ran her first Dutch national record in the eight-hundred-meter run. This was very special at the time, because it was precisely this distance that was considered extremely unsuitable for ladies. But according to some witnesses, Fanny walked very powerfully, she had very muscular legs. Her extraordinarily muscular female body was also seen as the basis for all her later successes.
Long distance or sprint? The surprising choice of athletics by Fanny Blankers-Koen.
Perhaps Fanny had been a very good long-distance runner, because she possessed, according to say: “lungs like bellows”, but would go down in history as a world-class sprinter. At the age of eighteen, she made her debut at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, where she finished fifth in the high jump and fifth in the 4 x 100 m relay, in 48.8 s. Fanny earned her first international medal in 1938 at the European Championships in Vienna (Austria). Fanny thought she could shine in 1940, but unfortunately the Second World War (1940-1945) put a big stop to this.
How Fanny Blankers-Koen excelled in athletics during the Second World War.
No, despite the lack of many big competitions, these years were a great success for Fanny. She set a world record in the 80-meter hurdles in 1942, and in 1943 she excelled in several other competitions, such as: “4 x 110 yards, and the 4 x 200 meters.” In the years that followed, the victories followed each other again and again, despite her pregnancies. And then in 1948, after that terrible Second World War, the Olympic Games were held for the first time in twelve years, in Fanny’s almost hometown of Amsterdam. When the Olympic stadium is full of 63,000 visitors, the games in which Bernhard van Lippe-Biesterfeld, the husband of the Dutch crown princess Juliana of Orange, also participated out of competition as a rider on horseback.
How Fanny stole the show from Prince Bernhard during the games.
Fanny, who found the athletics track of the Olympic stadium in Amsterdam too dangerous to participate because of its soft spots in the surface, was still in the stands half an hour before the start of the Olympic race. While the stadium speaker announces her participation, she angrily puts on her sneakers and warms up five minutes before the actual match in a side area of the stadium. She is white hot for the start of the 80-meter hurdles for women; she doesn’t give any of the other participants a glance, but her start falls right in the starting gun. Because of her anger, she walks like a: “Mad Bull”. And without really realising it, she leaves the rest of the runners far behind. Without really realizing it herself, she finishes blank in a world record time of 11 seconds. The crowd cheers, but Fanny has already disappeared into the catacombs of the Olympic stadium. The reporter of the race makes a funny comment afterwards: “why do they actually put obstacles on the course; Fanny never looks at them anyway!” Fanny won four gold medals at those games, this was just the beginning of a golden future, she won a total of 58 Dutch titles, 5 European titles, and set 21 world records. These performances made Fanny Blankers-Koen an icon in the Dutch sports world.
