Trailblazers
August 2025

Sanctuary celebrates Fanny Blankers-Koen, a Dutch Olympian who set numerous world records and whose victories are credited with helping to eliminate the belief that age and motherhood were barriers to success in women's sports.

Fanny Blankers-Koen ​(1918-2004)
Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Fanny Blankers-Koen (1918 - 2004) was a versatile, Dutch track-and-field athlete who became the first woman to win four gold medals at a single Olympic Games (London, 1948). During her career, she set world records in eight different events.

Fanny had five brothers. She was a natural athlete who enjoyed tennis, swimming, gymnastics, ice skating, fencing and running. However, she could not decide which sport to pick. A swimming coach advised her to concentrate on running because there were already several top swimmers in the Netherlands at that time; she would have a better chance to qualify for the Olympics in a track event, so she went with track and field.

Around that time, many in the Netherlands were concerned for the welfare of the family, saying that she should stay at home to look after her children, not compete in athletic events. But she persevered, training only twice a week for two hours with her children in tow. Her Olympic victories are credited with helping to eliminate the belief that age and motherhood were barriers to success in women's sports. In 1949, she travelled abroad to promote women's athletics, flying to Australia and the United States.

Despite obstacles, she set the first modern pentathlon record. All in all, she set world records 16 times in eight different events, including the pentathlon in 1951. Fanny served as the team leader of the Dutch athletics team from 1958 to 1968. ​In 1999, she was named the top female athlete of the 20th century by the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF).
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In her later years, Fanny suffered from Alzheimer's disease and lived in a psychiatric nursing home. She died at age 85 in Hoofddorp (North Holland) in 2004.

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Some interesting facts...

• On August 29, 1940, she married Jan Blankers (who was fifteen years her senior). Blankers was a sports journalist and the coach of the Dutch women's athletics team. Even though he originally thought women should not compete in sports, his attitude toward female athletes changed after he fell in love with Fanny.
• Some journalists questioned her, suggesting 30 years was too old for a woman to be an athlete.
• At the 1948 Olympics, she competed as a 30-year-old mother of two, earning her the nickname "The Flying Housewife.” Fanny won four of the nine women's events, competing in eleven heats and finals in eight days.
• Her personal record in the 100 m of 11.5 lasted for 62 years (Phanos, Dutch Athletic Club). It was finally broken in May 2010 by Jamile Samuel.
• In 1981, the Fanny Blankers-Koen Games, an international athletics event, was established.
• In 1999, Fanny was voted Female Athlete of the Century, thanks largely to her four gold medals at the 1948 London Games.
• An autobiography was written in 1949 with help from her husband.
• A year before her death, the first biography of Blankers-Koen was published, Een koningin met mannenbenen (A Queen with Men's Legs) by journalist Kees Kooman. During her successful years, Dutch and international media portrayed her as someone who was modest about her own achievements. It’s been suggested that Kooman's book portrays her as a woman who found it difficult to show affection and who was driven by a desire to win.

Two public statues of her have been erected in the Netherlands:
1954 Sculpture in Rotterdam by Han Rehm 
2007 Sculpture in Hengelo by Antoinette Ruiter

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