Mary Rand, who at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics became the first British woman to win a gold medal in track and field, setting a world record in the long jump and embodying the glamour, freedom and optimism of the Swinging Sixties, died on March 26 in Reno, Nev. She was 86.
Her death, in an assisted living facility, was from acute myeloid leukemia, her daughter, Sarah Toomey Williams, said. She had lived in the United States for nearly 60 years.
Rand’s success in Tokyo made her a sensation as a “golden girl” in the British media. Along with winning the long jump competition, she took a silver medal in the five-event pentathlon and bronze in the 4×100-meter relay, becoming the first British woman to win three medals in one Olympics.
The BBC named her Britain’s top sports personality of 1964, a transformative year for the country that included the British invasion in pop music, the ascent of mod fashion, enhanced property rights for women and the awarding of the first Nobel Prize to a British woman (in chemistry).
Rand met the Beatles and lunched with Queen Elizabeth II, and then wore a miniskirt to be honored by the queen in 1965 for her outstanding achievement. Mick Jagger described her to a teen magazine as his dream date. A coach or a journalist, depending on the telling, referred to the blonde Rand as Marilyn Monroe in track spikes.
Yet the pioneering Rand was much more than a sex symbol. She was married at the time of the Tokyo Games and the working mother of a 2-year-old daughter — rare for female athletes in that period, when now-debunked medical science held that strenuous exercise could be dangerous for pregnancy.
She inspired others who followed her into sport, challenging notions that women could or should not compete at an elite level once they became mothers, and showed that they could be both feminine and strong.
“Only working mothers truly understand what it takes to hold down a job, be pregnant, give birth, then be a parent while training to compete,” the sports journalist Alyson Rudd wrote in a tribute to Rand in The Times of London.
In an era of amateurism, Rand had a day job in London — traveling by scooter to work in the mail room of a Guinness brewery — and trained three nights a week. She told reporters that she drank a half-pint each lunchtime, but also later said she had only been joking.
On Oct. 14, 1964, in Tokyo, Rand and her competitors faced rain and headwinds in the long jump. But the foul weather was nowhere near as unnerving as the critical headlines that Rand, who had been a favorite in the 1960 Rome Games, had faced after finishing ninth.
In Tokyo, though, she took immediate command. The worst of her six jumps would have won a silver medal. Her fifth jump registered a stunning 6.76 meters. Because Britain had not yet adopted the metric system in track and field, Rand had to consult a conversion chart to find the equivalent imperial distance: 22 feet, 2 ¼ inches, a world record.
Two days later, Rand began competing in the five events of the pentathlon — 80-meter hurdles, shot put, high jump, long jump and 200-meter sprint — and took the silver medal. She won her third medal, in the 4×100-meter relay, on Oct. 21.
Rand, described by her daughter as a free spirit, said that after celebrating her victories, she sometimes had to climb a drainpipe to get back to her room after the Olympic Village was closed for the night.
“We only started partying after the events,” she told The Times of London. “Up until the day of competition, we lived like nuns.”
Mary Denise Bignal was born on Feb. 10, 1940, in the small city of Wells, in southwest England. Her father, Frederick Bignal, had a business sweeping chimneys and cleaning windows. Her mother, Hilda (Simpson) Bignal, was a nurse. Mary later described herself as a “total tomboy” who chased her eight siblings around an orchard and, by age 16, was invited to an Olympic training camp.
She won a sports scholarship to a secondary school called Millfield, but according to British news accounts, she quit or was expelled over a romantic involvement with a former student. It did not impede her climb toward Olympic success and, in later years, Rand gave her three medals to the school to put on display.
Before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Rand sustained an Achilles’ tendon injury and retired.
Her first marriage, in 1961, to Sidney Rand, a British Olympic rower, ended in divorce. In 1969, Rand moved to California and married Bill Toomey, who had won the decathlon in Mexico City and had attended the 1964 Tokyo Games as a spectator, marveling at the record distance of Rand’s gold medal jump.
Rand’s marriage to Toomey also ended in divorce. She was married a third time, in 1992, to John Reese, a retired Army command sergeant major who died in 2019. In addition to Ms. Toomey Williams, she is survived by another daughter from her marriage to Toomey, Samantha Toomey Ballard; a daughter, Alison Mitchell, from her marriage to Rand; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
She left behind the spotlight and potential careers in acting and modeling, and lived quietly in California and Nevada, doing some coaching and working for a physical therapist. The 1960s “were an exciting time, but she wasn’t fame-seeking,” Ms. Toomey Williams said of her mother.
Rand did return to her hometown before the 2012 London Olympics and was feted with a parade. In the marketplace in Wells, a brass inlay in the pavement, adorned with Olympic rings, marks the distance of her record jump.
Ann Packer, her roommate in Tokyo and the winner of the 800-meter race in 1964, said in tributes that Rand was “the most gifted athlete I ever saw.”
Others who came after Rand, Packer added, “owe a big debt of gratitude to Mary, because she was instrumental in giving women the belief they could succeed in sport like their brothers had done.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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