IN 1972, WITH every headline from Northern Ireland announcing fresh horrors, one woman’s achievement temporarily took people’s minds off the Troubles. At that year’s Olympic games in Munich, Lancashire-born pentathlete Mary Peters became Northern Ireland’s first gold medallist, uniting the province in sport if not in politics.
Peters, who had lived in Ballymena from the age of 11 and considered herself an “Ulsterwoman”, was up against the odds: she was 33, nearing the end of her peak, and she had to beat one of the world’s top athletes, West Germany’s Heidi Rosendahl. After competing in two previous Olympic games, Peters knew this was her last chance to make her mark. She not only won the pentathlon in a riveting climax, she also set a new world record.
Two days later, her win was overshadowed by a terrorist attack on the Israeli team in the Olympic village, but decades later, her achievements have been honoured in a number of ways.
Three years after her career-crowning victory, the Mary Peters track was built in Belfast, and is still the North’s premier athletics track. Peters became manager of the British athletics team between 1979 and 1984, and was president of the British Athletics Federation from 1996 to 1998. In 2000, Peters was made a dame commander of the British Empire, and at the Sportswoman of the Year awards in 2009, Olympic medallist Ronnie Delaney presented her with a Lifetime Achievement award. In the same year, she was appointed deputy lieutenant of Belfast. As part of her duties, she was Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the funeral of Alex Higgins last August, and was on hand to greet the queen on her Northern Ireland visit the following October.
Asked whether she and her fellow Northern Irish athletes brought communities together, she told The Irish Times: "We highlighted sport as a positive means of getting people to come to Northern Ireland, to play sport, or to acknowledge there was another life outside the Troubles, and that it was a very positive life."
