Women's 800m: From Banned to Track's Biggest Draw

The 1928 Olympics should have been a breakthrough moment for women athletes. Instead, it sparked three decades of exclusion based on a lie.

After Karoline Lina Radke won the first women's Olympic 800m in Amsterdam, false reports claimed competitors suffered extreme exhaustion. Olympic officials used these fabricated stories to ban women from the race for 32 years, declaring them too delicate for the two-lap distance.

Ann Brightwell didn't think about making history when she crossed the finish line at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The 22-year-old teacher had just won gold and set a world record of 2:01.1, becoming the first British woman to win Olympic gold on the track.

"My husband said to me, 'you don't realise what you've done,'" Brightwell, now 84, recalls. "But now I realise I played a very small part in women running longer distances."

Training looked different back then. Brightwell fit runs around her teaching job, jogging through village streets while neighbors honked and stared. Many athletes in her era had to resign from their jobs or take unpaid leave just to compete.

The next barrier fell in 1979 when Christina Boxer-Cahill became the first British woman to break two minutes. At the European Cup final in Turin, the 22-year-old looked up at the clock and saw 1:59.05.

"It's a bit like when Roger Bannister broke four minutes for the mile," Boxer-Cahill, now 69, explains. "Once he'd done it, everybody did it because you see what's possible."

The Ripple Effect

From a race women weren't allowed to run, the 800m has become track and field's headline event. Today, the battle between Britain's Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson and Swiss European champion Audrey Werro captivates millions of fans worldwide.

Audrey Werro recently came within 0.42 seconds of breaking the 41-year-old world record. The current record of 1:53.28, set in 1983 by Czech athlete Jarmila Kratochvilova, remains controversial due to Cold War era doping questions.

But the athletes who fought to even compete in the race aren't focused on the controversy. They're celebrating how far women's sports has come.

Brightwell and Boxer-Cahill paved the way for today's stars to run without anyone questioning whether they're too frail. The race officials once banned is now the one everyone wants to watch.