Betty Cuthbert obituary: the one and only Golden Girl
Betty Cuthbert was Australia’s greatest track and field athlete, and arguably the most loved.
Betty Cuthbert, Athlete.
Born Merrylands, NSW, April 20 1938. Died, Perth, WA, August 6, aged 79.
The abiding memory is of a lovely young girl, striding hard, thrusting forward, gulping air through a mouth so wide open she looks to be roaring with exultation at someone ahead.
For those old enough, and privileged enough, to have been at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the early days of the 1956 Olympic Games, it is a memory that will never be erased.
Betty Cuthbert was 18, with bobbed hair the colour of hay and knees that pumped high as she surged down a brick-red track. And there was of course nobody ahead. She was sprinting her way into history, an unknown Sydney youngster on her way to becoming Melbourne’s, and Australia’s, Golden Girl.
That fond label would stay with her for all the years afterwards, until the very end, symbolic of her entrenchment in the collective affection of a nation. Australia has had a wonderful procession of female athletes, from Fanny Durack through to Cathy Freeman and Stephanie Rice, but Cuthbert was always the one and only Golden Girl.
It is part of legend now that she won three gold medals in 1956, for the 100m, the 200m and the 4 x 100m relay. The timing of her rush to form — and her consequential passage to glory — was exquisite. Before the Games she had almost waded to one national title on a freakishly muddy track in Brisbane, but had not won a single state senior championship.
Her modest reputation, matched by her demeanour, was overshadowed through most of the Olympic year by those of two established sprinters, Shirley Strickland and Marlene Mathews, both world-record breakers. Early in 1956, when those two were being rated major Games prospects, Cuthbert was not even ranked in the world’s top 15. So poorly did she regard her own chances of even being selected in the Australian team that she bought tickets to attend as a spectator.
She began to show real form that September, when she shocked everyone, including herself, by breaking the world 200m record. Then, at trials a month before the Games, she won both the 100m (beating Mathews over that distance for the first time) and the 200m. Her performance at the Olympics made her the first Australian, male or female, ever to win three gold medals at a single Olympics. (The track and field preceded the swimming, at which Murray Rose performed the same feat).
Eight years later, after a retirement that did not last, Cuthbert tackled the 400m at the Tokyo Olympics, ran flawlessly and collected a fourth gold medal. For 40 years afterwards she shared a precious record with Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose: they were the only Australians ever to have won four such medals. In Athens in 2004, Ian Thorpe broke that barrier, lifting his total to five.
Cuthbert and her twin sister Marie, known as “Midge”, were born on April 20, 1938, in Merrylands, Sydney, daughters of a factory worker who later opened a plant nursery. Running barefoot, she won sprint events at the age of eight at Ermington primary school, near Parramatta. She went on to win state primary championships, and at 13 joined her first and only coach, June Ferguson.
Ferguson, who as June Maston won a silver medal in the sprint relay at the 1948 London Olympics, was a physical education teacher at Parramatta Home Science School, where Cuthbert began her secondary education.
She was impressed by the youngster’s natural long, raking stride and high knee lift, making no attempt to change them. She concentrated largely on Cuthbert’s starting, and a “run-through” finish whose objective was to ensure that she was in full flight when she reached the tape.
At Ferguson’s urging, Cuthbert joined the Western Suburbs athletic club, and under her tutelage, progressed through the 1951 schools championships in Hobart to serious interclub running, and in 1956 to the Olympic training squad. At 16 she left school, worked for nine months in a baby-clothing factory, then joined her father’s nursery, becoming a plant propagator.
Cuthbert was unprepared for the public adulation that followed her triumphant occupation of the MCG. It shadowed her everywhere, even after she retreated to the security of the plant nursery — and it discomfited her. At the 1960 Rome Games, her prospects wrecked by a hamstring injury, she watched from the grandstand as a black American, Wilma Rudolph, took her titles.
She resolved not to run again. The old excitement was gone, and fame had proved a nuisance. She couldn’t even bear to look at the scrapbook her mother had kept of her achievements.
The comeback that followed 18 months later, she always insisted, was not her initiative. She claimed she heard an inner voice, nagging at her, “Run again, run again”. She kept resisting it, but came to believe that this was a dialogue with God. “I knew it was Him,” she said later. “I tried to resist, but I finally just had to give in.”
It was this spiritual persuasion that set her on the path to Tokyo, and the fourth gold medal: one that came to mean more to her than any other. After conditioning sessions with Percy Cerutty and further work on her technique by Ferguson, she began to set world records again in 1963, this time for the quarter-mile.
She walked to the start of her 400m final in Tokyo in a state of great serenity, humming to herself. She felt God was in charge. “It wasn’t me running really that day,” she told me years later. “It was as if my body had been taken over. He picked my feet up, and I put them down.” Later she offered thanks in prayer. She believed, quite simply, that she had been the beneficiary of a miracle. It was the last, and most satisfying, race of a career that embraced nine world records.
Cuthbert became a victim of multiple sclerosis in 1969, and went to live in Western Australia in 1985, attracted by the opening of a Pentecostal church and an attendant Bible school. Although only an occasional churchgoer in her early years, she had always possessed great faith. Her devoutness intensified after the illness, and at 47 she became a born-again Christian.
From around the time she moved to the resort town of Mandurah in 1991, close to her friend and ultimate carer, Rhonda Gillam, Cuthbert was confined to a wheelchair. Those strong legs that pounded their way to four gold medals became still, and wasted; but if there was ever a temptation for self-pity, she resisted it.
She had some awful setbacks, losing her home to a mini-tornado in 1993 and her money to a conman in 1998, then suffering a brain haemorrhage in 2002. She bounced back each time, never complaining. She always seemed utterly content, sustained by loving company, her deep faith, and an unfailing cheeriness of spirit. She retained an apparent innocence that had been there since teenage days. There was no room in her character for malice, even for plain dislike.
Her most public appearance in recent years was in her wheelchair during the final passage of the torch at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Raelene Boyle pushed her, and Cuthbert handed on the torch, with a kiss, to Dawn Fraser.
Cuthbert and the boisterous rebel Fraser — so markedly different in style and temperament — began and ended their lustrous Olympic careers together (in 1956 and 1964), and remained good friends through the decades that followed.
With an energy that astonished many, she crossed the continent many times after the Sydney Games, mostly for Olympic functions, like the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Melbourne Games, but also for events aimed at stimulating research into MS. She also travelled to Christmas Island to meet Vietnamese Christian refugees, and to New Zealand for Olympic-themed events. She was always accompanied by the devoted Gillam.
One of her most enduring friendships was shared with Julius “Judy” Patching, who was official starter at all of her Melbourne Olympic races and later her team manager. He called her “Skip” or “Skipper” (she had captained his women’s track and field team in Rome in 1960) and declared for more than 50 years that she was his favourite athlete. The regard was mutual: she stated often that no other starter relaxed her on the blocks as he did.
Betty Cuthbert was Australia’s greatest track and field athlete, and arguably the most loved. Appropriately, she has been immortalised in bronze sculpture outside the MCG. It is a work that matches the memory, and yes, that mouth remains wide open. She still looks to be roaring at whatever’s ahead.
Journalist Harry Gordon, who covered every Olympic Games between 1952 and 2012 and was the official historian of the Australian Olympic Committee, passed away in 2015.
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