LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD/MARY PETERS:IT'S SOMETIMES argued that pioneers of women's sport didn't see themselves as overcoming any obstacles because they didn't see any obstacles to begin with. They were simply doing what they enjoyed best and if that meant making inroads into what was then mostly a man's domain then even better.

This is true in the extraordinary sporting career of Mary Peters, except she found other obstacles in her way – beginning with the Troubles in her native Northern Ireland, and the notion that she was too old for Olympic glory.

What allowed Peters to overcome these obstacles, real or otherwise, was the pure love of athletics, which since her schoolgirl days in Ballymena taught her a sense of value and achievement that remains as strong today as it did over 50 years ago, the day she travelled down to the UCD Sports not realising the far greater journey she was about to embark upon.

“I think it was 1955, or 1956,” she recalls. “Maeve Kyle brought a group of us down, and it was quite sensational. Women had never bared their limbs before. There is some RTÉ footage of me high jumping at those sports, with ladies in the stand in their flowery hats, and Eamon de Valera walking past, with his long cane and top hat. We were true amateurs, simply enjoying our sport.

“I was lucky – my older brother first encouraged me to do sport, and everything he tried to do, I tried to do better. Also in school we had a headmaster who encouraged all of us to get involved in out-of-school activities, and, for whatever reason, athletics was the one that he saw me as a natural.

“I started to enjoy some success, and as a result of that the headmaster would stand up on a Monday morning and say the athletics team did well, and Mary Peters did this. That created a feeling of being valued, because I wasn’t academically the brightest. It was my moment of glory.”

Shortly after finishing school Peters won seven events at the Northern Ireland athletics championships, which provided the catalyst for making the pentathlon her speciality (the five-discipline event, which in 1984 became the seven-discipline event, the heptathlon). Although born just outside Liverpool, Peters had moved to Ballymena as an 11-year-old when her father’s work was transferred there, and ever since she has always considered it home.

Ballymena athletics club, under Maeve and Seán Kyle, provided the foundation but there were other influences too, south of the border: “Billy Morton would invite me down to Dublin for some of his events. He did so much to promote the sport, and we just loved him.

“Then when Ronnie Delany won his gold medal in 1956 it made us all realise that athletes from the island of Ireland could do well in the Olympics. I first went to the Commonwealth Games with Northern Ireland in 1958, as an 18-year-old. I was star struck by it all, queuing up for breakfast alongside medallists. It was the 1966 Commonwealth Games before I won my first medal, and even then I didn’t know how it would be accepted, and thought that people would be jealous of me being successful. Of course they weren’t.”

Having finished fourth in her first Olympics in 1964 and then ninth in 1968, carrying an ankle injury, Peters went to Munich in 1972 as the absolute veteran, even though she’d just turned 33. “Back then women athletes would usually retire in their early 20s. They had to get on with a career, because there was certainly no question of partaking in sport as a full-time occupation. I was working full-time right through to Munich, having trained as a teacher, except for going to America for six weeks, to get away from the Troubles, and the rain.”

When she did secure her place in Olympic history, winning the pentathlon gold medal, in a world record, Peters soon realised the wider consequences, although some of them were exaggerated.

“People have tried to say people like myself and Barry McGuigan brought communities together. We didn’t actually do that. We highlighted sport as a positive means of getting people to come to Northern Ireland, to play sport, or to acknowledge there was another life outside the Troubles, and that it was a very positive life.

“But in ways the greatest joy for me is what I’ve been able to achieve since my success. Like funding the Mary Peters Track here in Belfast, and the charity that encourages young people in Northern Ireland to get involved in sport.”

That cause, helping others get involved in sport, is what made Mary Peters to begin with.