‘Why I wanted to bring Olympic gold back home to Ulster’

The whole province remembers the glorious moment when Northern Ireland’s Mary Peters stood on an Olympic podium to pick up her gold medal for participation in the women’s pentathalon. She tells JOANNE SAVAGE about her incredible sporting life.
Mary at her historic win in 1972Mary at her historic win in 1972
Mary at her historic win in 1972

She was officially a natural treasure. Local painters have completed her portrait. John Sherlock did a magnificent statue of her that looms over Lisburn. She has remained an avatar of the best Ulster can be.

The TV footage of her standing on the Olympics platform to receive her medal, bearing a wide, warm smile of jubilation, reminds you that this is one of the most standout moments in our sporting history. Out of the ashes of war-torn Belfast a sporting phoenix had risen.

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When her win was declared over the Tannoy in the stadium, she says: “It was just wonderful that everyone was cheering for me and saying my name and having a good time. It was the best feeling.

“You know Northern Ireland had been having such a difficult time and I just wanted to bring something positive home to the city,” she enthuses. And she did just that.

Peters talks with humility about it all, but her Olympic gold in the female pentathlon was an historic moment reported worldwide.

“It was absolutely the proudest moment of my life”, says Mary. “But something that you never expect will happen to you.”

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To win her Olympic gold, she narrowly beat the local favourite, West Germany’s Heide Rosendahl, by 10 points, setting a world record score. After her victory, death threats were phoned into the BBC: “Mary Peters is a Protestant and has won a medal for Britain. An attempt will be made on her life and it will be blamed on the IRA ... Her home will be going up in the near future.” But, robust to the core - always a determined woman with a steely mind-set - Peters insisted she would return home to Belfast.

“I was shocked and frightened by that but I wanted to come home and I did,” And so she defied the paramilitaries with something of the sheer defiant grit that must shape a true athlete.

When she first arrived in Belfast she was greeted by fans and a band at the airport and paraded through the city streets, the exuberance palpable en masse. Because of security precautions she was not allowed back in her flat for three months. Turning down jobs in the US and Australia, she chose to study in her native Ulster, considering this her natural, if adopted, home.

Mary Peters was born in Liverpool in 1939. She describes her mother as a lovely, kind, home-loving lady and a great mum, while her father “used to go off everyday on his motorbike wearing a bowler hat”. He worked in insurance. She described how she, her mother and brother John, all ultimately moved with him to Ballymena and later to Portadown where he had got a new job.

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“I remember when I got to Ballymena I just couldn’t understand what people were saying and I really needed other girls in the class to translate for me,” she laughs, acknowledging that it took her a while to adjust to the new Ulster way of life.

And her interest in sport was soon piqued.

While at Portadown College, Mary was 11 when one day she spotted boys playing athletics through the hedgerows. After getting permission from her head teacher and her PE teacher, she was allowed to take part and was thrilled, feeling ‘this is exactly where I need to be’.

Incidentally, the rising sports star was also head girl of the school in 1956.

So she began training and competing from a young age; her talents becoming visible early; her confidence grew as accolades took over her shelves. She used broomsticks and bamboo for high jumps to improvise.

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“My dad would drive me to wherever I could compete and that would include pentathlons, 200m, the long and high jumps, hurdles and the shot put.”

She came third, as she recalls, in Northern Ireland first women’s pentathlon when she was just 16. “People started to say, ‘Oh, this girl has a bit of talent’.”

For her 17th birthday her Dad gave her enough clay for her to lay a shot put circle.

She was soon breaking the Northern Ireland record: “I would say I was well on my way back then.”

But sadly around this time her mother died.

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“It was difficult because people did not talk about cancer in those days and I had no idea about how ill she had really been. It was also hard for me because on the evening of her death, my dad asked the woman who was my mum’s bridesmaid and my godmother if she would come and live with us as housekeeper, with a view to getting married.

“I couldn’t understand this. Having loved my mother so much I found it very, hear hard to see him move on so quickly, So athletics was very important to use as an escape from family difficulties at that time. Sport became that place I could go to escape the stresses I was experiencing.”

Her brother John, her father and his new wife, all moved to Australia and Mary remained, aged 18; she was alone in Ulster, but she would be sustained by that incredible love of physical activity and the kind of energy and attitude that would eventually take her to the arenas of the Olympics and Commonwealth Games all across the world. By 1958, Mary began officially representing her country as an athlete.

“I didn’t have any great expectations, I just loved competing. Even if we didn’t win, doing athletics was always my first love. I didn’t go out dancing or to bars or the cinema, I trained and that was what I really enjoyed most and especially the people I met who shared that interest.”

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During a photoshoot she met her probably most important personal trainer, Buster McShane. “He ran a gym in Belfast and was a weight-lifter. He said he could make me better than I was. He would just squeeze your arm, and say ‘that was great but you could do better’. He was a perfectionist and wanted you to be one as well. Buster could see I had the talent to run faster, jump with more agility, and throw the shot put greater distances. He always believed in me! Since his death I remember his insights all the more fondly.”

In 1968 Tokyo Olympics Mary came fourth. But Mary and Buster had bigger plans. At the 1966 Commonwealth Games Peters had decided to compete in the shot put with Buster encouraging her to gain weight in order to be able to do this properly. “ It was lots of milk and cheese and protein so I could take on this competition and be ready for it. I was challenged to gain three stone.” In the event Mary won silver. And would go on to pick up another three medals at the Commonwealth Games.

She gave Belfast runners the much-loved Mary Peters Track; before that we were the only ountry in Europe without ome; Mary wanted a proper race track as her legacy and as a way of inspiring others to try running.

Mary concludes, with that now very familiar smile: “My life has been extraordinary for a small, shy little girl from Liverpool to have this kind of success and to be embraced by so many friends here in Northern Ireland.”

The Sporting Life Mary Peters an be watched on the BBC IPlayer

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