Betty Cuthbert, multiple sclerosis and the gift of Rhonda Gillam

Betty Cuthbert achieved Olympic glory. But robbed of movement by a cruel disease, a remarkable friendship sustained her.

From left, Betty Cuthbert, Gloria Cooke, Nancy Fogarty, Marlene Mathews.

Australian sprinting legend Betty Cuthbert has died after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. In this special feature for The Weekend Australian magazine in 2015, Trent Dalton tells the story of the special friendship that sustained her through her battle with the disease.

You might say I was called to it.

You might, were you to replace the science of happenstance with the mysteries of faith, suggest I was drawn inexplicably to Dewey Decimal spine number 796.092 of my local library and fated to flip to page 32 of Rohan Clarke’s The Golden Girl and rest my eyes for a full minute on Betty Cuthbert’s black and white 18-year-old smile, the angel in running spikes, arm in arm with fellow members of the NSW women’s relay team – Gloria Cooke, Nancy Fogarty and Marlene Mathews – titans of the 1950s golden age of Australian athletics, or maybe four female leads in an MGM matinee. You might say the thought came to me as a direction, as divine instruction, and not simply a notion from a brain partial to Olympic legends.

Betty Cuthbert wins the 100m final at the Melbourne Olympics.

Ring Betty Cuthbert.

“I can’t believe this,” gasps Rhonda Gillam, a 78-year-old West Australian mother-of-three who has devoted the past 24 years of her life to caring for Betty Cuthbert through the cruellest half of the Golden Girl’s 46-year battle with multiple sclerosis.

“This is amazing that you are calling just now,” Rhonda says. “Ohhh, this is meant to be.”

“How so?” I ask.

“I was just saying to myself, ‘It’s time, it’s time,’ ” Rhonda says.

“Time for what?” I ask.

“Time to tell our story,” she says.

A grey-sky day and an empty wooden bench seat at the circle driveway of the Aegis Greenfields nursing home on Lakes Road, Greenfields, an hour’s drive south of Perth. Twelve minutes’ drive from here is the sprawling Betty Cuthbert Park with a metal sign reading: “Betty Cuthbert (Golden Girl) won three gold medals at the Melbourne Olympics (1956) and another gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics (1964). During her athletics career she held 16 world records. Betty moved to Mandurah in 1991 and became an inspiration to the community through her talks to school children about her Olympic achievements and for her education on the impacts of multiple sclerosis.”

A woman in big brown sunglasses hurries across the nursing home carpark. Rhonda Gillam beams a welcoming smile and immediately starts her story at the middle, with Zorro, her dog of 18 years. Betty Cuthbert gave Zorro to Rhonda and her husband, Keith, as a gift. She missed Betty’s lunchtime because Zorro passed away this morning. “I loved that dog so much,” she sighs. “And so did Betty. We put him in a big bag and buried him, placed a Betty Cuthbert rose on top of him,” she says. In 2010, a rose was named in Cuthbert’s honour to raise ­awareness of MS. “I’ll try not to think about Zorro,” Rhonda says. “All part of the plan.”

She marches to the entrance of the nursing home: “Let’s go find Betty.”

Lunch has finished and Betty Cuthbert, 77 – the working-class girl from Parramatta via Melbourne, Rome and Tokyo – is lightly napping in her electric wheelchair in the lounge area, her head resting on a small red pillow. Rhonda gently rubs her arm and speaks into her left ear.

“Betty,” she says.

Betty’s head flips up. “Rhonda!” she beams, eyes alight. That smile, straight out of page 32 of my library book. Rhonda says Prime Minister Tony Abbott saw that smile in person and shed brief tears of joy for reasons he couldn’t explain.

Australian track champion Raelene Boyle has told me about that smile. “The fact she can still throw a smile!” Boyle says. That is, the fact she can still smile after everything Raelene has seen her great friend and athletic benchmark endure through an illness that long ago stole the movement of a girl who was born to move. For Boyle, that smile means hope.

Boyle thought regularly about that Cuthbert smile through the mid-to-late ’90s when she was diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancers. That Cuthbert smile represented a certain way of ­dealing with things, a grace and strength, an acceptance of the paths fate builds for us all. In 2000, as she pushed her hero and friend of 30 years into ­Stadium Australia for the Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, she saw that smile up close, when Betty leaned back, one hand on the Olympic Torch, and looked at her with tears streaming from her eyes.

“Betty has always helped me believe there are others going through a lot worse than I’ve been through,” Boyle says. “And there’s still something powerful in a smile from Betty Cuthbert.”

Betty moved into Aegis Greenfields six years ago when her specialist told Rhonda her MS care needs were too high for Rhonda to handle alone. “She can’t hear much,” says Rhonda. “Speak close into her ear.”

I tell Betty I’ve been reading about her in old yellow press clippings and watching grainy YouTube videos of her races.

“Medals galore for Golden Girl!”

“Cuthbert shatters record!”

“Betty is our champ for 1964!”

Melbourne, 1956. The blonde-haired, twig-thin 18-year-old daughter of Parramatta ­nursery workers – a high school graduate who, only months ago, was making baby clothes in a ­Sydney factory – digs her running spikes into Melbourne soil and nails her start in the 100m sprint like she’s been running in front of 100,000 people for decades. An awkward and bony style with a high knee lift, almost ­heaving her body along the track, running as though with every wide leg stride she’s head-butting through an invisible brick wall. Her mouth flies open – her ­signature ­racing tic – so wide she thinks her jaws are going to split. “Lithe teenager our first gold ­medallist!”

Five days later, she wins the 200m in 23.4 ­seconds and Melbourne’s The Argus ­morning daily readies its printing press for page one: “Betty Cuthbert – Golden Girl”. By her third event, the 4 x 100m women’s relay, she’s a national icon. The relay is perfection, the single finest three-quarter-minute Australia has given to sport. The Golden Girls. Shirley Strickland to Norma Croker, Norma Croker to Fleur ­Mellor, Fleur Mellor to Betty Cuthbert.

Her lifelong friend, former hometown training partner and former president of ­Athletics Australia, David Prince, now aged 73, has told me about that moment when Betty crossed the line first. He was 14 years old, watching in the stands with his mother. “The determination to pass the girl from England to make sure ­Australia won the gold, the stadium just lifted with her,” he says. “The whole stadium stood up and roared. I was changed that day. We all were. But Betty never changed at all. Here’s this girl who was feted by Robert Menzies and the world’s media. She went back home and pulled weeds out of her dad’s bloody nursery. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

I tell Betty I think she’s the greatest athlete we ever produced. She screws up her face. “Really?” she says. It feels like she’s forgotten that possibility. Then the thought finally registers in her mind and that Olympic track week in ’56 comes flooding back.

“Awwwww, that’s nice,” she says. And a tear runs down her left cheek. Rhonda smiles warmly, gives Betty a hug.

“Betty’s always waiting to see Rhonda,” says the home’s administration officer, Annie Silver. “They share something very, very special.”

A fellow resident, Lorraine, leans over to Betty. “Betty’s always asking for Rhonda, every moment, ‘When is Rhonda coming in?’” ­Lorraine says. “Rhonda comes in and feeds Betty and then she gets up and she helps pick up everybody’s plates, buzzes about.”

Rhonda pushes Betty to her room through a hall beyond the dining area. Her name is fixed by the room’s entry door: “Betty Cuthbert”.

Rhonda tenderly runs a lipstick over Betty’s lips. “She likes to have some lippy when she meets new people,” Rhonda says. She adjusts a thin scarf hanging over Betty’s stomach.

“I don’t like this,” Betty says. She runs a hand self-­consciously over a small pot belly. MS is a ­disease of the central nervous system affecting nerve impulses in the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. One of the many side-­effects of Betty’s MS – and the effects can be different and unpredictable for all who live with it – has been ­messages not making it to muscles. She long ago lost ­muscle movement in a stomach that in 1956 could crack coconuts. “Yeah,” she says, ­patting her belly like an expecting mum. “You can keep guessing what this one’s going to be.”

Rhonda Gillam and Betty Cuthbert.

The room is purposefully simple, a single bed with a few framed pictures on the walls. Betty beside champion thoroughbred Makybe Diva. Betty launching a boat named in her ­honour. “That was our first outing together where I pushed her in a wheelchair,” Rhonda says. “That was a big step. November 24, 1991. She didn’t ever want to go in a wheelchair. But then she just said to me, ‘Rhonda, I have to get a wheelchair’.”

No trophies, no medals. “She’s never needed any of it,” Rhonda says. “She’s never needed to be the greatest.” There’s only one photograph here of Betty in her running days. A shot of her crossing the finish line in her finest hour, her mighty comeback race in the first Olympic women’s 400m final: Tokyo, 1964. She had retired from athletics after a bitter and injury- prone Rome, 1960, Olympic campaign, returned to work at the family nursery. One afternoon, after 14 confused and directionless months out of competition, she gave in to what she described as a voice in her head. She was in no doubt as to whom the voice belonged to.

“She was so pleased to finish up,” Rhonda says. “To not train anymore, she was so happy. But God spoke to her in an audible voice to make a comeback. She fought it for a long time. But, ‘All right, you win, I’ll run again’.”

Still wrestling with ankle and foot injuries, she was only an outside chance to win in Tokyo, with a field of powerhouses such as Australia’s Judy Amoore and British champion Ann Packer, the overwhelming favourite. She was already physically spent turning into the home straight when she was slammed with a driving wind that felt, she said, like an “invisible hand” pushing her towards the finish line. She finished the race on faith alone. She knew the race had already been won, she had seen herself win it, well before the smoke of the starting pistol. She was, she felt, merely a vessel that day for something greater than she could understand. “She didn’t even run that race,” Rhonda says. “She used her legs but someone else ran that race.”

Second place-getter Ann Packer would later reflect on the race in David Hemery’s The ­Pursuit of Sporting Excellence: “When I spoke to Betty years afterwards, I realised that I wouldn’t know if I could ever have won that race. She is a mystical girl with very strong religious beliefs. I call her mystical because she has an inner understanding of herself, which would be very difficult for anyone else to touch.”

When Betty crossed the finish line in Tokyo, the only race she felt she ever ran ­perfectly, she posed a question to God: “Have I done enough?”

Betty smiles looking at the picture. “The action,” Betty smiles. “The leg action there.” Her speech is slow and strained. Today is a good movement day. “Some days she can hardly talk,” Rhonda says.

“Everything … is … rrrrrright,” Betty says. “My coach would be … plllllleased.”

Betty looks at Rhonda.

“June’s gone,” she says, sadly.

Betty’s beloved and legendary running coach, June Ferguson, died in 2004. Ferguson was teaching physical education at Parramatta Home Science School when she spotted her student Betty’s gift, aged 13.

“Yes, she’s gone,” Rhonda says.

“Gone,” Betty says.

Betty points to a photograph with her only functioning hand. “That’s Dawn there,” Betty says. “Great swimmer. Sprinter swimmer.”

A week ago, Rhonda was feeding Betty ­dinner when they saw their close friend Dawn Fraser on television. “She came on TV,” says Rhonda, “and Betty said, ‘Dawn’s so attractive with her white hair’. Then the phone rang. ‘Hi Rhonda, Dawnie here. I’m in Perth and want to come see Betty’.”

Such things happen often to Rhonda. She’ll help a couple of strangers who share the same names as her son and daughter-in-law. She shows me a photograph she took of a cloud breaking apart into the shape of a dove. She shows me a photograph of a dollop of tomato sauce that landed on her pie in the shape of a love heart. She knows what these things are: signs and messages from God.

She was stuck in traffic recently when she quietly sent a mental message upstairs: “I love you God.” She immediately looked up from her steering wheel to see the passing car of a hopeless romantic, or fan of Irish rock, with the licence plate: “ILUVU2”.

“Oh, I’m a very strange girl, I know,” Rhonda laughs. She sits on an armchair beside Betty, wraps her best friend in a knitted woollen throw rug and starts the story from the beginning, when God sent her the message that would transform the last third of her life, three words she neither heard nor read but received all the same. Ring Betty Cuthbert.

The symptoms were subtle. Limbs falling asleep. Limbs wagging briefly and involuntarily. When Betty’s clothes brushed against her skin her body would tingle. Then an arm muscle would fail abruptly and a teacup and saucer would crash to the kitchen floor. It was the ­Australian summer of 1969. It wasn’t until ­February 1974 that Betty would receive a ­definitive diagnosis of MS, a disease that 23,000 Australians live with today.

She kept the disease to herself, telling only a small group of family and friends, and got on with her life. But the symptoms increased. Inserting a key into a keyhole became a challenge of ­physical and mental endurance. Turning on a light switch. Applying lipstick without smudging it across her cheeks.

“I can remember going to Betty’s home, I think it was in the ’70s,” recalls Raelene Boyle. “We had a barbecue in her backyard and I can remember she fumbled a couple of times and tripped a couple of times; it just didn’t seem right. I didn’t really think about it at the time. I thought, ‘She’s just having a bad day’. It was part of the MS and she hadn’t announced at that stage that she was unwell.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to have your physical ability to move and look after yourself and everything in life – your freedom of movement that takes you out into the big wide world – I can’t imagine what that would be like, having been an athlete, to have that taken away.”

Fiercely independent, increasingly solitary, Betty moved reluctantly into the home of her older sister, Jean, and accepted support from a deeply loving family: parents Les and Marion, brother John and twin sister Midge.

As the MS deepened, so did Betty’s faith. In 1982, having never married, she left her family in Sydney for a home she bought in the solitary country hills north of Lismore, northern NSW. She later told an increasingly inquisitive press: “I love Sydney, but I found my parents and friends wanted to do too much for me. Their warmth and feeling for me was great, but I knew in my heart that I had to go it alone.”

In Lismore in May 1985, in a ceremony led by Reverend Gordon Moyes of Sydney’s ­Wesley Mission, Betty was “born again”.

“Betty and I were both born again but that’s a stupid saying,” Rhonda says. “It really means your heart changes. People say, ‘Ohhh, those born-agains’, but all that happened was our hearts changed and our lives changed with it. It’s a relationship with God.”

Months later, Rhonda explains, Betty was invited to the opening of the Pentecostal Rhema Family Church in Perth, which boasted the great Australian tennis champion and Betty’s long-time friend, Margaret Court, as one of its most dedicated parishioners. Betty had found her new home. In September 1985, against the advice of family, she moved permanently to Perth to dedicate herself to the Rhema Church.

“Betty is a very independent person,” says twin sister Midge Johnston, a widowed mother of four who lives in Sydney’s north-west and makes regular visits to Perth to visit Betty, often staying in Rhonda’s home. “She wanted to go to Perth and she went. In lots of ways I felt quite sad because she wouldn’t have her family who could always be going to see her. We’ve always had something special.

“For all her accolades, to me she’s just my twin. She’s part of me. But I have a family of my own, you can only go so many times a year over to Perth. I get a bit upset about it but there’s nothing you can do about that. But Rhonda’s been marvellous. I mean, 24 years!”

Rhonda was vacuuming her living room floor when she received her first message from God. It was 1985. She was 48 years old, living in Mandurah, an hour south of Perth, a mother of three adult kids running a successful local bus charter business with her husband, Keith. The message asked Rhonda to give up her life – the social life she loved, her tennis, the golf she played with her husband – for something too grand to properly explain. “I had an amazing life before this,” Rhonda says. “Being radical, going on bus trips and golf trips, living for fun. And I gave it all up that day.”

Six years later, Rhonda was rushing out her front door, about to attend her granddaughter’s netball game, when she received a second ­message from God. “Betty got her message audibly,” Rhonda says. “She says she heard it. I never heard a voice, never saw a vision of God, no angels or anything, just a message: Ring Betty Cuthbert.”

Rhonda shrugs her shoulders. “So I picked up the phone and rang Betty Cuthbert.”

They had met briefly, earlier that year, through church. Rhonda described her devotion to God. Rhonda described her message. Rhonda said she had been called by God to care for Betty Cuthbert. She didn’t know why. She didn’t ask. “Betty believed too,” she says. “We drove down to Mandurah and she knew as soon as she drove into Mandurah, ‘I’ve got to live here’.”

She moved into a unit within four minutes’ drive of Rhonda and Keith’s home. And Rhonda went to work. She mopped Betty’s floors, scrubbed her bath, massaged her legs, applied her make-up, brushed her hair, made her lunch, drove her to the shops, drove her to specialists, endlessly replied to fan mail, cleaned her clothes, assisted with her ablutions.

“She showered her, she did everything for her,” says Midge Johnston. “She didn’t think a thing of it. She just did it.”

Carer, cleaner, confidante, comfort. Some days Rhonda would walk in to Betty’s home to find her passed out on the floor, blood running from her head after a fall. “The friendship builds from all these incidents because you both know you’re doing something that has to be done but never thinking in a million years that it was going to be 24 years,” Rhonda says.

“The first months were overwhelming. I remember driving to her unit in Perth. She was a recluse. She hadn’t given her phone number to anyone. She asked me to just give her first name to people, never say her full name, ‘Betty ­Cuthbert’. Her dining room table was just a mess with fan mail that she’d given up answering.” Letters from cities and towns across ­Australia, from Lithuania, France, England and America, some letters addressed simply and ambitiously to “The Golden Girl, Australia”.

“Betty describes her MS as though she’s a frog who’s been thrown into a pot of cold water then someone turned on the gas,” Rhonda says. “It boiled her slowly and she didn’t even realise. She once was able to walk into my daughter’s wedding with a hand on my arm. Now she can’t even move her toes. The only thing she can move is that left hand.”

“Getting old ain’t fun,” says Ron Clarke, the 78-year-oldformer middle- and long-­distance champion and Gold Coast Mayor from 2004 to 2012. Clarke has followed his friend Betty’s life from near and far throughout her MS struggle. “When I first met her she’d been sick for quite a while,” he says. “She was virtually destitute. So I employed her, personally, from my own pocket.”

Clarke ran a sports company in the 1970s that regularly employed Betty to promote its products. “I was just upset that she had done so much to be such a legend of Australian sport and then no one was helping her. I was disgusted. She was our greatest athlete. But she was also fiercely independent. So needing assistance was something foreign to her.”

For years Clarke watched Betty fight her disease largely alone as she actively fought off first a wheelchair and later the notion of full-time care, relenting, at last, to the divine intervention of Rhonda.

“When you get the call, you get the call,” Clarke says. “You have no idea what Rhonda’s done. She took her in, her and her husband, and they looked after her. Phenomenal. Had it not been for Rhonda, I don’t know what would have happened to her after that.”

Says David Prince: “Rhonda became her family because her family couldn’t get over to WA all the time. Her dad and her mum passed away and then I think Betty totally relied on Rhonda and it became a very, very close bond. To the point where I think Rhonda might have, at times, upset people when she might have said, ‘No, Betty’s not going anywhere without me.’ She had the best intentions because Betty couldn’t go on her own. Rhonda knew how to look after her.”

“Probably she had a calling,” Midge Johnston says. “But I think she’s just a special friend who was sent to look after her. She’s just been a good person.”

“I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body so I find it a bit hard to relate to,” says Boyle. “But you see things like this from time to time that are just out of the blue. The whole story is remarkable. It’s unique to find someone who is willing to do that in life. It’s quite an extraordinary commitment.

“Over the years Betty’s disability has been demanding at times. I think the patient one was Rhonda’s husband.” Keith wasn’t religious yet he never questioned his wife’s calling. He would drop her at Betty’s house most work days. He did his job. Rhonda did hers. Keith died of bowel cancer three years ago.

In the sunroom, Rhonda looks at Betty, smiles. Rhonda’s been praying lately for a ­miracle. “MS is all to do with the nervous ­system,” she says. “Wouldn’t be hard for God to send down a new nervous system?”

She sighs. She’s 78 years old and tired. Sometimes she finds herself looking inward and asking God the same question Betty asked in Tokyo: “Have I done enough?”

“I’ve seen so many friends from this home die,” she says. “I’ve sat with about nine people here before they were dying, letting them know the angels are coming to them. And I don’t need any more of that. I’ve told Him, ‘Lord, I’m over it’.” She shakes her head. “And I don’t want to see Betty Cuthbert in a wheelchair anymore.”

Some nights ago, Rhonda heard Betty saying a quiet prayer in her room. “Thank you, Lord, for everything,” she prayed. “Thank you for spoiling me so much.”

“And I thought, ‘Oh yeah, sitting in a bloody wheelchair, the greatest runner we’ve ever had sitting on her backside for 23 years’,” Rhonda says. “Yep, spoiled rotten.”

Rhonda wipes a tear from her eye.

“Whhhhat?” Betty asks, struggling to hear her best friend.

Rhonda raises her voice.

“Sitting in a bloomin’ wheelchair is crap,” she says. “Twenty-three and a half years you’ve sat in that bloody wheelchair.”

Betty shrugs, turns her wheelchair around so the sunroom’s West Australian afternoon light makes her glow; amber-coloured, golden even. She smiles. Rhonda nods her head in silent understanding. There’s still something powerful in a smile from Betty Cuthbert.

May 27 is World MS Day: msaustralia.org.au