Fanny Blankers-Koen, who has died aged 85, was an athlete of outstanding talent and unrivalled achievement. In the years after the second World War she raised women's track and field athletics to a new plane and did more than anyone to elevate her sport from a barely recognised sideshow grudgingly tacked on to the men's programme.
In 1948, a 30-year-old housewife with two children, Fanny won four gold medals in the Olympic Games in London, a haul only otherwise achieved in the history of the games by Jesse Owens in 1936 and Carl Lewis in 1984.
Francina Koen was born in Baarn, a small town in the Dutch province of Utrecht. Her father was a keen shot-putter and discus-thrower, and she had four brothers to encourage her early aptitude for sport. After flirtations with swimming, fencing and gymnastics, she joined an Amsterdam athletics club as a teenager and found the coach who would guide the tall, awkward-looking prodigy through her entire career.
Jan Blankers, 14 years her senior, had recently retired as a triple-jumper of Olympic standard. His problem with 17-year-old Fanny was how to channel the talent she presented: she was fast; she had sensational spring in her long legs; she was immensely strong; and she had a natural stamina which first led her to specialise in the 800 metres. This event, though, had been dropped from the women's Olympic programme, so coach and pupil looked elsewhere.
In the Berlin games of 1936 at 18 she took sixth place in the high jump and held her place in the 4 x 100 metres Dutch relay squad that finished last in the final. She was enough of a teenager to consider her most memorable achievement of the games lay in getting Jesse Owens's autograph.
Two years later, when the European Athletics Championships sanctioned women's competitions for the first time, her emphasis had turned to sprinting, and she won bronze medals in both the 100 and 200 metres.
During the war there was a six-year cessation of international competition. Fanny Koen married Jan Blankers, and they had a son, Jantje, in 1942 and daughter, Fanneke, in 1945.
Fanny continued to build up her speed, technique and power and by the end of 1943, though restricted to domestic competition, she was a world-record holder at the 80 metres hurdles, the high jump and the long jump. When international athletics resumed in 1946 with the European Championships, she captured her first international title, in the hurdles, and her now-devastating pace anchored the Dutch quartet to a gold medal in the sprint relay.
Her preparation for the 1948 Olympics was spectacular, capturing records on the way. That April she had turned 30, an age which in those days was considered (principally by men) beyond the limit of a woman's sporting lifespan
The British athletics team manager, Jack Crump, opined that Fanny would be a spent force by the time the games began. Jan Blankers would later claim that he only had to shout "You're too old, Fanny", to put an extra yard of pace into her training routines.
Confronted by a ruling that restricted women to three individual events, she dropped the two field events at which she still led the world, the high jump and long jump, and opted for speed. She would face 11 gruelling races in the space of a week, a task made far worse by the dreadful London weather.
She powered through the 100 metres heats and final. In the hurdles final she overcame a poor start and a near-disastrous mistake at the fifth barrier to edge out in a photo-finish Britain's hope. Then she suddenly felt overwhelmed by her own achievements, by the expectations of the Dutch and by the near-hysteria being whipped up by the press over the fact that the fastest woman in the world was a 30-year-old mother who was now beginning to miss her two children desperately.
She determined to pull out of the 200 metres, a distance which she did not enjoy. "All right, Fanny," said the imperturbable Jan in the face of her tears, "give it up if you wish. But I'm afraid you'll regret it later."
She relented, won her heat and semi-final, and in the final strode away on the straight to beat the field by seven metres, a margin that has never since been approached in the event.
Then to the relay. The other members of the Dutch squad were essentially moderate sprinters, and Fanny received the baton in fourth place behind Australia, Canada and Britain and crowned the games with a relentless, storming run that clinched her fourth gold medal in the final few strides.
"The Flying Housewife" was the toast of Holland and, embarrassed, she would be driven through Amsterdam with Jan and the children in an open carriage behind four white horses.
Two years later, at the European Championships in Brussels. despite the return of the Germans to competition and the first appearance of the formidable Soviet women's team, she once again won the 100 and 200 metres and 80 metres hurdles and took a silver in the relay.
Those medals were to be her last tangible rewards in international athletics, but she turned to the pentathlon, which was still a decade from Olympic recognition. The five disciplines - hurdles, high jump, shot-putt, long jump and 200 metres - were ideally suited to her and she duly added the pentathlon to her bag of world records, in Amsterdam in September 1951.
At her last Olympic Games, in Helsinki in 1952, blood poisoning and a skin complaint curtailed her preparations and forced her to withdraw from the sprints and the relay. In the hurdles final she hit the second barrier hard, stuttered to a halt and walked dejectedly from the stadium.
During 21 seasons she set 20 world records at eight different events and forced a radical rethink of the very nature of women's role in sport.
Francina (Fanny) Elsje Blankers-Koen: born April 26th, 1918; died January 25th, 2004