alleged collaboration with the occupying forces. At the first post-war European championships in Oslo in 1946, Fanny Blankers-Koen won the gold medal for the 80 metres hurdles, confirming the progress she had made during the war. This despite the fact that the preparation of the Dutch ladies team had not gone well. The athletes were driven through devastated Germany in a rickety coach that was forever breaking down. Nor was the crossing from Denmark to Norway without its problems, and to cap it all the coach got stuck in a Norwegian tunnel. It could move neither forwards nor backwards. The exhausted athletes reached the Norwegian capital just hours before the first starting shot was fired.
The ‘four golds in London’, with which Fanny Blankers-Koen matched Jesse Owens' achievement in Berlin, was by no means the end of the story. Despite exhausting journeys to the United States and Australia, she succeeded in preparing well for the 1950 European championships, which were held in Brussels. She won three gold medals there (in the 100 metres, 80 metres hurdles and 200 metres). Experts said that the ‘flying housewife’ could also have created a stir at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, but boils ‘in a very delicate place’ put a stop to that.
Was Fanny, as well as being a legendary athlete, also the perfect mother and housewife, the understanding lady without airs, as she was for so long portrayed by much of the Dutch press? Most of the people Kees Kooman talked to had to admit that the apparently effortless combination of top athlete, mother and housewife was a fabrication. For a long time, the long jump and high jump pits were the only playgrounds available to her children, Fanny junior and Jan junior. Others mercilessly shatter the picture of Fanny Blankers-Koen as an emancipated woman before feminism had been heard of. Her role in the family was usually that of the subordinate housewife. Jan Blankers' word was law, and not only on the training ground.
Friends and acquaintances who knew her from the beginning also point out that fewer and fewer people associated with the former athlete. This was not just a matter of the transience of fame. Fanny was known, and not only by other competitors, for her egocentrism and surly, capricious personality; though these are characteristics found in many top sportsmen and women. There was also the recordbreaking athlete's fear of being surpassed by a rival, a fear of shadows which in her case assumed destructive proportions. As a result, Fanny Blankers-Koen and her entourage were responsible for the painful fate of the Frisian athlete Foekje Dillema. Blankers-Koen considered this rising star to be not a woman but a man, who had no place in a woman's contest. It is true that Dillema did have several masculine traits (probably the result of a complicated chromosome defect whereby the adrenal glands produced too many male hormones), but one can safely assume that when she was born the doctor did not record her as a girl without due consideration. Nevertheless, the leaders of Dutch athletics subjected this Frisian athlete to an arbitrary and degrading examination; under pressure, it is said, from Jan Blankers and his wife. Just when she was about to leave for a major competition, it was made clear to Foekje Dillema that she would never again be allowed to take part in any athletic contest. No appeal was possible against this decision.
It is to Kees Koomans' credit that he has put the myth of Fanny Blankers-Koen into perspective and returned her to the realm of flesh and blood. You do sometimes get the feeling that he lets the pendulum swing too easily to the negative side, so it is unfortunate that the subject herself can no longer respond. Enfeebled by Alzheimer's and strokes, Fanny Blankers-Koen spent her last years fading away in a nursing home. She appeared in the Dutch newspapers just once more when she died on 27 January 2004.
Hans Vanacker
Translated by Gregory Ball
Kees Kooman, Een koningin met mannenbenen. Amsterdam / Antwerp: L.J. Veen, 2003. 240 pp. isbn 90-204-0820-8.
