In 1964, athlete Mary Rand (née Bignal) was voted Sportsview Personality of the Year or, in other words, BBC Sports Personality of the Year, in recogmition of her becoming the first British woman to win an Olympic gold medal in track-and-field. Speedway rider Barry Briggs finished second in the poll of readers of the ‘Radio Times’ after winning the World Championship of Speedway for the third time, while another athlete, Ann Packer, who won the gold medal in the women’s 800m, and silver in the women’s 400m, at Tokyo 1964 finished third. Packer, who roomed with Rand in Tokyo, said of her, “Mary was the most gifted athlete I ever saw. She was as good as athletes get. There has never been anything like her since. And I don’t believe there ever will.”
In the final of the women’s long jump at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Rand broke the Olympic record with five of her six jumps and, on her fifth attempt, set a new world record of 6.76 metres on her way to the gold medal. Three days later, she won the silver medal in the women’s pentathlon, which was making its first appearance at the Olympics, and in which Irena Press, of the Soviet Union, set a world record of 5,246 points in winning the gold medal. Another four days later, alongside Daphne Arden, Dorothy Hyman and Janet Simpson, Rand also won a brozne medal in the women’s 4 x 100m relay. In fact, she remains the only woman to have woman three track-and-field medals, of any colour, at the same Olympics.
Rand was created Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 New Year Honours and subsequently won the gold medal in the women’s long jump at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. She retired in 1968, having missed the Summer Olympics in Mexico, but, interestingly, held the unofficial world record in the women’s triple jump until 1981. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) did not recognise a world record in the event until 1990, but in 1959, as Mary Bignall, she jumped 12.22m in Street, Somerset.