Great British female Olympians down the decades

Team GB 07 Mar 22

As one of three countries to have appeared at every single Olympic Games, Great Britain boasts a long lineage of trailblazing women.

British Female Olympians

From one female athlete at Paris 1900 to more women than men for the first time at Tokyo 2020, the growth of Team GB has been powered by its female contingent.

We take you through some of the most iconic females Olympians through British history down the decades.

Women making British sports history

1900s - Charlotte Cooper

Declared completely deaf at the age of 26, Charlotte Cooper’s achievements on the tennis court still ring out more than a century later.

She holds the distinction of being the first woman ever to become an Olympic champion with singles gold at the 1900 Games in Paris and was the first woman to represent Team GB too.

It’s fair to say they were different times. Cooper’s nephew Bob Beausire once recounted what his auntie, who was known to her loved ones as Chattie, did the first time she won.

"She biked home from Wimbledon and found her brother at home pruning the roses. When he asked what she'd been doing she replied, 'I've just won the Championship', at which point he said nothing, turned and went back to pruning his roses."

Charlotte Cooper, the original trailblazer of women's tennis

1910s - Belle White

Belle White won Britain’s first-ever Olympic diving medal with bronze in the platform event at Stockholm 1912.

Also a proficient swimmer who won international titles in the water, she went on to compete at three further Games and did so at nearly 34 years of age in 1928.

Diving at the Olympics in White’s day was completely different to what we know - and arguably more challenging, with divers competing on both 10 metre and 5 metre platforms.

White’s story is little known but her name lives on in the sport to this day. The Belle White Trophy is still awarded to the top female team at the English Age Group Championships.

1920 - Lucy Morton

Lucy Morton was never earmarked as the first British woman to win an individual Olympic swimming title.

But she did just that in the 200m breaststroke at Paris 1924, surging to gold as Britain’s world record holder Irene Gilbert languished in fifth place.

She was the only non-American winner of a women’s swimming title at that Games - Morton’s win was so unexpected that the British national anthem wasn’t ready to be played and a correctly-sized flag couldn’t be found for the victory ceremony.

Morton’s Olympic gold medal was a guest star on Antiques Roadshow in 2020 when granddaughter Julia took it on the show for inspection. It was valued by BBC expert Adam Schoon at £15,000.

1930s - Cecilia Colledge

Figure skater Cecilia Colledge is the youngest athlete to have ever represented Team GB.

She was the youngest competitor from any nation at the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, competing in the singles event at the age of only 11.

Colledge, who served as an ambulance driver in World War II, went on to win Olympic silver at Garmisch-Partenkirchen four years later.

1940s - Maureen Gardner

Flying Dutchwoman Fanny Blankers-Koen was the undisputed star of London’s second staging of the Games in 1948, but Maureen Gardner was only a split second behind her.

Gardner won silver in the 80 metres hurdles at her home Games, edged out by Blankers-Koen with both athletes initially credited with a joint world record of 11.2 seconds.

The sprint hurdler took up athletics after contracting pleurisy and pneumonia and was advised to try the sport to regain her strength.

Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Gardner later founded and developed ballet schools in three English cities and Ottawa, Canada and was an overseas examiner for the Royal Academy.

1950s - Gillian Sheen

50 years after first competing in the Olympic fencing programme, Gillian Sheen bagged Team GB their first gold.

The then-28-year-old beat Romania’s Olga Orban to take victory in the foil.

In the excitement of the victory, the British team manager rushed to congratulate her and only narrowly avoided being impaled on her sword.

Sheen, a dental surgeon, settled in New York and set up an orthodontics practice alongside her husband,

1960s - Mary Rand

The original ‘golden girl’ of British athletics, Mary Rand delivered one of the great performances from a British female athlete at Tokyo 1964.

She broke the world record to win long jump gold, snatched silver in the pentathlon and bronze in the 4x100m relay, showing an incredible range of form and talent.

The gold medal made her the first British woman to win gold in an Olympic athletics discipline.

That amazing Games earned her the Sports Personality of the Year award, the second woman to win it after Anita Lonsbrough did so in 1962.

1970s - Mary Peters

Following in Rand’s footsteps, Mary Peters redefined women’s multi-eventing and delivered the performance of her life on the biggest possible stage at Munich 1972.

The Northern Irish star outlasted German favourites to break the pentathlon world record and win Britain’s first Olympic multi-event title.

Peters remained in track & field for many years after her crowning glory as a team manager, including at the Olympic Games.

1980s - Tessa Sanderson

The success of British women at the Olympics in the late 20th century was all about track & field and Sanderson was the next to break new ground for Team GB.

Having been devastated not to make the final at Moscow 1980, Sanderson became the first British female to win an Olympic title with gold in LA four years later.

Defined in the public eye by a fierce domestic rivalry with Fatima Whitbread, Sanderson would become the second track & field athlete from any nation to reach six Olympics.

1990s - Sally Gunnell

Sally Gunnell’s dominance of women’s endurance hurdling in this decade spoke for itself.

Sally Gunnell remains the only British female athlete to have won Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth titles in the same event, and the only woman to have done so over 400m.

Gunnell scorched to a convincing Olympic victory at Barcelona 1992 and broke the world record a year later.

2000s - Rebecca Adlington

The Noughties heralded an initial explosion of Olympic success for British female athletes.

Denise Lewis, Shirley Robertson, Victoria Pendleton and Christine Ohuruogu were among those to dazzle with gold at the Games.

But Rebecca Adlington’s double gold in Beijing 2008 took some beating in a sport where Britain’s women had conspicuously struggled for decades.

With 400m gold Adlington became the first British woman since 1960 to win swimming gold and then the first British swimmer full stop to win multiple medals with 800m glory.

Dive deeper into Rebecca Adlington's story

2010s - Helen Glover

Like Adlington, Helen Glover broke the glass ceiling for British woman on the rowing lake as she became the nation’s first female Olympic champion in the sport alongside Heather Stanning.

The women’s pair gold famously broke the seal on the London 2012 medal rush and the duo returned to defend their title at Rio 2016.

Glover would also compete at Tokyo 2020 as the first mother to represent Team GB in rowing.

She was joined on Team GB in 2012 and 2016 by so many incredible female contemporaries, including Jessica Ennis, Laura Kenny, Katherine Grainger, Charlotte Dujardin and many, many more.

Tokyo 2020

Team GB fielded more female athletes than male for the first time and they delivered countless memorable moments in Japan.

Among them were BMX gold medals for Charlotte Worthington and Beth Shriever and a historic fifth Olympic gold for Laura Kenny in a majestic Madison with Katie Archibald.

Hannah Mills also became the most decorated female sailor in Olympic history with 470 gold alongside Eilidh McIntyre.

Beijing 2022

Team GB have won gold at the last four Olympic Winter Games and all of those have been won by female athletes.

This time it was the turn of Eve Muirhead, Vicky Wright, Jennifer Dodds and Hailey Duff who beat Japan in the final to claim Britain’s first women’s curling gold since 2002.

Sportsbeat 2022