Great Britain’s legendary ex-Olympic champion Mary Rand dies, aged 86

Legendary athlete Mary Rand, the first British woman to ever win Olympic gold in track and field, has died at the age of 86.

Great Britain’s original “golden girl”, Rand topped the podium in the long jump at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, doing so with a world-record leap of 6.76m.

She then went on to achieve a feat that wouldn’t be replicated until Emma Finucane’s heroics at Paris 2024, adding pentathlon silver and 4x100m relay bronze to her Tokyo haul to become the only British female athlete to win three track and field medals in a single Games.

Rand was voted the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year for her success in 1964 before being awarded an MBE in the 1965 New Year Honours.

Born in the Somerset town of Wells on 10 February 1940, Rand passed away in the United States, where she lived for many years alongside husband John Reese.

“UK Athletics is saddened to hear of the death of Olympic, European and Commonwealth champion Mary Rand, at the age of 86,” a statement from British Athletics read.

Tributes were led by Mary Peters, one of her four room-mates at the Tokyo Games, who won Olympic pentathlon gold at the 1972 Games.

“She was the golden girl of her era and the most gifted athlete I ever saw,” Peters said.

“She worked hard and played hard, and she was a very talented all-around athlete. She could swim, she could she could play netball, she was a hockey player. And if you put her on the trampoline she would do front and back flips.

“I even went with her to dart tournaments once at Crystal Palace, and whoever threw the first bullseye won a free set of golden darts. Naturally she got a bullseye with her first dart.”

Two years after glory in Tokyo, Rand took home long jump gold in the 1966 Commonwealth Games held in Kingston, Jamaica, going one better than the silver she had achieved eight years earlier at the event in Cardiff, when she was just 18. She also won two bronze medals at the 1962 European Championships.

Rand retired from the sport just before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics after seriously damaging an Achilles tendon, which saw her miss out on the squad.

But her fame had soared beyond sport in the the 1960s, with Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger famously declaring Rand to be his ‘dream date’, though she insisted she was more of a Beatles fan.

GB teammate Ann Packer, who similarly took home gold at the Tokyo Games and also shared a room with Rand, branded her as “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,” Packer said.

Rand won the first medal of the 12 Team GB collected at Tokyo 1964, and later recalled: “If you talk to Ann Packer, she will say, ‘Mary came back and she’d won a gold and it inspired everybody’. They all thought, ‘If Mary can do it, we can do it’.”

Rand also held the world record in the triple jump from 1959 to 1981, albeit an unofficial title as the women’s triple jump was not recognised by World Athletics until 1990.

She moved to the United States with her second husband Bill Toomey, the Olympic decathlon champion, three years after her divorce from rower Sidney Rand. Her marriage with Toomey lasted until 1991 and she later settled with Reese, holding UK/US dual citizenship.