Australia's "Golden Girl"

The amazing sprinter Betty Cuthbert, four times an Olympic gold medallist, has gone home

Michael Cook | Aug 9 2017 | comment

Betty Cuthbert with her gold medal in Tokyo

The world’s most famous sprinter, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, retired this week after losing the 100-metre race in the world championships to America’s Justin Gaitlin. Placing third was a bitter end to his stellar career, especially since Gaitlin has been suspended twice for drug use. Bolt consoled himself by partying on until 5am in Britain's seediest VIP night club, The Box.

The chaotic lives of this generation of top sprinters are a million miles away from one of Australia’s greatest athletes, Betty Cuthbert, who died on Sunday at the age of 79.

In 1956, in Melbourne, Cuthbert was the first Australian to take away three Olympic golds. She won the 100-metres, the 200-metres and the 4x100-metres relay. Eight years later she hit gold in the 400-metres in Tokyo. She is still the only person to have won golds in all of the sprint events.

In Australia “the Golden Girl” was a revered figure. When the Games returned to Australia in 2000, the 110,000-strong crowd at the Sydney Olympic Stadium stood up and roared as she entered.

But they were not just cheering a great sportswoman, but a woman of great courage. For Cuthbert had multiple sclerosis and could no longer walk. She was wheeled into the stadium with the Olympic flame strapped to her wheelchair.

In 1956 Cuthbert was a shy, modest girl from Sydney with a radiant smile and a will to win. Ever since she was a child, Cuthbert recalled in later life, she felt that God had given her speed to give him glory. She loved athletics, but the Olympics seemed like an unattainable dream. She even bought a spectator ticket in case she wasn’t selected.

However, before she ran in Melbourne her grandmother gave her a Bible verse: "But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will be strong like eagles soaring upward on wings; they will walk and run without getting tired." It proved to be prophetic.

After the Melbourne Olympics she returned to weeding in her parents’ plant nursery in Sydney. She kept running but before the Rome Olympics, she tore her hamstring. She took that as a sign: God no longer wanted her to run. But the 1964 Tokyo Games were different – she felt that God was calling her. And as she crossed the finish line, she asked Him, “Have I done enough?”

It was a question, it seems, that she asked often during her life.

After MS took hold in 1969, her life changed, relentlessly, for the worse. At first she travelled the world searching for a cure. But in 1985, she was “born again” in a Christian church, and grew to accept her limitations.

“Now I have accepted the MS,” she wrote in one article. “I have never once asked, ‘why me?’ Because I love God so much, I've always thought it must be for a reason.”

Suffering is a mystery on many levels. The most common question is: why am I labouring under grinding hardships while other SOBs waltz through life? But the more interesting question is: how is it that some people bear years of suffering without complaint, even with joy, while others are crushed by a feather? Research into this would benefit humanity far more than research into the quickest and cheapest way of euthanizing patients.

We should have asked Betty Cuthbert. She won the highest honours that the sporting world has to give, four Olympic golds, and then lost everything except her smile. Over the years she grew less and less mobile and finally had to enter a nursing home in a suburb of Perth, in Western Australia. Towards the end of her life, she could barely speak.

But even then, she smiled. A few months before she passed away, her carer heard her whispering, “Thank you, Lord, for everything. Thank you for spoiling me so much.”

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

August 9, 2017
We published our lead story today before the storm burst over Google's firing of an engineer because he called for a debate over sex differences in the workforce. I wonder what Google would have done had its hapless employee circulated Steven E. Rhoads's post, "Equal but different: mothers and fathers are not interchangeable". It's a solid, well-documented and thought-provoking piece. Enjoy!