The girl from Dunedin had two fouls. She was at her third jump in the Olympic long jump final at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium on a cool Wednesday afternoon, 23 July 1952, and on the morning of the same day she had wrenched her right knee in the warm-up. The ligaments were sprained. The knee was strapped. She had qualified that morning with an Olympic record of 6.16 metres, despite the strapping. Now, in the final, she had over-stepped the take-off board twice. One more foul and she was out of the medals. One more foul and the five years of work since she had joined the Otago Athletic Club in early 1947 would have been for nothing.
She backed up the runway and marked her run-up out again. She came down the cinder. She hit the board cleanly. She was in the air, her legs cycling in the hitch-kick she had learned on the Dunedin sand. She landed at 5.90 metres. It was not a great jump. It was a clean jump, and it kept her in the competition.
Her fourth jump was 6.24 metres. It was a new Olympic record. It was a centimetre under the world record held since 1943 by the most famous female athlete in the world, Francina ‘Fanny’ Blankers-Koen of the Netherlands, the ‘Flying Housewife’ who had won four golds at the London Olympics four years earlier. Her last two jumps were both safe and both shorter and neither mattered. The Soviet pentathlete Aleksandra Chudina took silver at 6.14m. Britain’s Shirley Cawley took bronze at 5.92m. Williams took the gold. It was the first Olympic gold any New Zealand woman had ever won, and it was the first Olympic gold any New Zealander, of either sex, had ever won in a field event.
She was 23 years old. She boarded with an aunt and uncle in Devonport and worked as a secretary. She trained before work in a spare-room gym her uncle had built, lifting home-made concrete blocks and sandbags, and ran the hills of the Auckland Domain in army boots in her lunch hour. Her coach, Jim Bellwood, was a New Zealander who had spent three years of the war as a prisoner of war in Greece, escaped at his second attempt, and come home by way of Loughborough College in Britain as a trained physical education instructor. None of that was the unusual part. The unusual part was that she was the best in the world at the long jump, and on the evidence of how she got there she had earned every centimetre of it.
This is who she was, what she did, and why a country whose sporting memories tend to start with Hillary and Snell and end with Lisa Carrington still owes a particular debt to a quiet, polite, ferociously competitive woman from Caversham.
The girl from Caversham
Yvette Winifred Williams was born in Dunedin on 25 April 1929, and carried her mother’s name as her middle name. Her father Thomas was known as Tom, her mother Winifred as Winnie. The family lived in Caversham, the steep working-class suburb that climbs out of the south end of the Dunedin flat towards Lookout Point. Her younger brother Roy, born in 1934, would grow into a champion athlete in his own right.
Caversham produces a particular kind of child. The streets are steep enough that you arrive at school every morning having already done some climbing. Yvette walked to Otago Girls’ High School, and the walk home was a steady incline. Her authorised biographer, the Commonwealth gymnastics gold medallist Angela Walker, recorded the story her family preserved of the steep Caversham hill on which the small Yvette set herself the rule that she had to run up further than she had managed the day before, without stopping.
She was a games player before she was a track athlete. She played netball and basketball through school and beyond, and she represented New Zealand at basketball in 1950 and again from 1953 to 1955, with the spring you might expect of a long jumper and the timing you might not.
The track turned up almost as an afterthought. In early 1947, aged 17 and recently out of school, she joined the Otago Athletic Club. Two months later, at the 1947 national championships, she won the shot put title. It was the first of 21 national titles she would win across five disciplines.
Jim and Emmy Bellwood
James Charles ‘Jim’ Bellwood was a New Zealander who had come up the hard way. A foster child who left school for farm labouring, he was taken prisoner in Greece in 1941 and spent three years as a prisoner of war, escaping at his second attempt. He recuperated in Britain and trained as a physical education instructor at Loughborough College before coming home, bringing with him a systematic, modern approach to conditioning that New Zealand club athletics had rarely seen. He was about 35 when Williams began athletics. His service to sport was later recognised with an MBE in 1984, and he died in 1994.
His wife Emilie Bellwood, known as Emmy, was an Estonian refugee and a physical education specialist. The two met while she was teaching at a summer school. She knew how to teach a young athlete to use her body as a sequence of articulated levers rather than a single weight, and her calisthenics drills became a daily fixture of Williams’ training for the rest of her career.
Bellwood, coaching at the Otago Athletic Club, identified Williams early as a prospect of unusual promise. In 1948 she was controversially left out of the New Zealand team for the London Olympics. She did not complain in print. She trained.
The sandhill at St Clair
St Clair, the ocean beach at the south end of Dunedin, is one of the more honest pieces of geography in New Zealand. The sand is dark grey. The southerly blows hard and almost continuously. The dunes behind the beach are a soft, slipping, ankle-deep slope of fine sand. It is a miserable surface to run on. It is, for that reason, a very good surface to train on.
This is where Bellwood ran his Otago Athletic Club squad. The sessions were built on the dunes, with bounding drills in the soft sand and long, hard, repeated runs up the slope itself, and it was here that Williams built the spring and the strength that would carry her to Helsinki.
The hitch-kick was being learned in those sessions too. The technique involves running in mid-air, in the second between take-off and landing, so that the legs cycle through instead of remaining still. Bellwood thought Williams could master it, and she did, on the soft sand of St Clair, where the cost of a bad landing was a bruised hip rather than a cinder track. What the hitch-kick does, in plain English, is this. When a long jumper takes off, the body’s natural tendency is for the legs to swing forward fast and the upper body to fall back, which dumps the jumper into the pit on the heels, with the centre of mass already behind the feet. The hitch-kick keeps the legs cycling in mid-air, like a bicycle pedalled in reverse, which keeps the upper body upright and the centre of mass over the feet for as long as possible. At the moment of landing, the legs are thrown forward together for the heel-strike, and the heels land further from the take-off board than they otherwise would. At the level Williams was about to operate at, that was the difference between a placing and a gold medal.
Emmy Bellwood, meanwhile, was teaching the calisthenics, daily drills that treated the body joint by joint. Williams did them every morning.
The Auckland Empire Games of 1950
The first British Empire Games to be held in New Zealand opened on 4 February 1950 at Eden Park in Auckland. They were the fourth Games of the series, postponed from their planned 1942 date by the war, and they were the first major international athletics meeting that Williams had ever competed in. She was 20, and she was entered in the javelin and the long jump.
The javelin came first. Williams took silver with a throw of 124 feet 6 and 3/4 inches, 37.97 metres, behind the Australian Charlotte MacGibbon, with her New Zealand teammate Cleone Rivett-Carnac taking bronze.
The long jump came late in the Games, on 11 February. Williams jumped 19 feet 4 and 5/8 inches in the old measurements, 5.91 metres. It was a New Zealand record, an Empire Games record, and a British Empire record, all in the one jump. The distance was modest by Williams’ later standards. It was decisive in the field she was in.
She came home New Zealand Sportsman of the Year (a name the trophy committee saw no need to update for a woman), and with the unspoken understanding that she would be the leader of the next New Zealand Olympic team. The team was Helsinki, two years off. The work began that night.
The build to Helsinki
Bellwood took a teaching job at Avondale College in Auckland in early 1952, on the grounds that Helsinki was six months off and Auckland’s longer summer track season would give Williams more competitive long jumping than another southern winter. Williams went with him. She boarded with an aunt and uncle in Devonport, where her uncle built her a gym in a spare room. The routine was an hour of exercises before work with home-made concrete blocks and sandbags, a secretarial job in the city, lunch-hour runs up the hills of the Auckland Domain in army boots, and training with Bellwood at the end of the day. Emmy ran the calisthenics. The whole programme was on a shoestring.
That summer, at the 1952 national championships in Hamilton, she jumped 6.29 metres. The wind that day was over the legal limit of two metres per second, so the jump could not stand as a record. It told her, and everyone else, what she was capable of.
The team flew to Helsinki, the first New Zealand Olympic team to travel by air, a journey of about a week in stages. Williams arrived in the Olympic Village with time to settle. She was 23.
The morning of 23 July 1952
The qualifying round of the women’s long jump at the Helsinki Olympics was held on the morning of Wednesday 23 July, with the final the same afternoon. Williams’ warm-up went badly. She wrenched her right knee, the ligaments were sprained, and the team physiotherapist strapped the knee. She qualified anyway, on her first jump, with 6.16 metres, an Olympic record. She said afterwards that she had jumped “extra hard because there was a band of Russians out watching”.
The afternoon of 23 July 1952
In the final, the Soviet all-rounder Chudina was the biggest threat on form. Cawley, the young Briton, was the dark horse. Williams had the best qualifying mark. The competition gave every jumper three attempts, with the leaders after three rounds getting three more.
Williams’ first jump was a foul. Her run-up had been calibrated in the morning, and the strapping on her right knee had altered her stride length by the smallest amount that ruins a long jumper. The red flag went up. Her second jump was a foul too. The crowd noticed. Williams went back and shifted her check marks back four inches.
Her third jump was 5.90 metres. It was, by her standards, a polite jump. It did the only thing it needed to do, which was to keep her in the competition. She had three more attempts and a knee that was settling into a stiffer, more reliable lever.
The fourth attempt was the one. The take-off was a perfect hit. Six point two four metres. The white flag went up, and the Olympic record was hers. Chudina answered with 6.14m. Cawley managed 5.92m. Neither could close the gap. Williams’ fifth and sixth attempts were both shorter than 6.24m and neither was needed. The medal ceremony was held in the centre of the stadium an hour later. She was 23 years old, and the first New Zealand woman ever to stand at the top of an Olympic podium.
At the same Games she finished sixth in the shot put, three days after the long jump, and tenth in the discus. The two performances are usually footnoted in the histories. They should not be. They are the evidence that Williams was not a long jump specialist who had trained one event. She was a multi-event athlete who had trained several, and in any other Olympic team she would have been the strength entry and the hopeful gold medal at the same time.
The honours and the work
She came home a hero. She was named New Zealand Sportsman of the Year for the second time, in 1952. (The trophy committee finally renamed the award some decades later.) She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours of 1953, at age 23. She was photographed almost continuously, in the brief late-1952 way of the New Zealand press, in her best skirt and her best smile.
She also, between Helsinki and Vancouver, kept working and kept training. The secretarial job stayed. The spare-room gym in Devonport stayed. The lunch-hour runs on the Domain stayed, army boots and all, along with Emmy’s daily calisthenics. The whole apparatus of her life in 1952 and 1953 was the apparatus of a woman who had organised her existence around a single sport. She wanted Vancouver in 1954. She wanted the world record. She got both.
Triple gold in Vancouver
The fifth British Empire and Commonwealth Games ran in Vancouver from 30 July to 7 August 1954. Williams was now 25, the world record holder, and entered in four events, the long jump, the discus, the shot put and the 80 metres hurdles.
The shot put came first. On 1 August she won gold with 13.96 metres, a Games record. On 6 August she finished sixth in the 80m hurdles final in a wind-assisted 11.4 seconds.
Then, on 7 August, came the afternoon the schedule-makers should never have allowed. The long jump and the discus throw were scheduled at the same hour, in two different rings, a hundred metres apart on the infield. She had to compete in both. She would, over the course of the afternoon, change between long jump spikes and discus throwing shoes 12 times, walk back and forth across the infield, and take her throws and her jumps in the gaps her own movement allowed. She won both. The discus distance was 45.01 metres, a Games record. The long jump distance was 6.08 metres, also a Games record. Three gold medals, every one of them with a Games record.
She later called it “probably the best performance of my career”. It is hard to disagree. The Helsinki gold was the famous one. The Vancouver triple was the technically harder one.
The world record at Childers Road
The world record had come about five and a half months earlier, on a still Saturday afternoon at Childers Road in Gisborne on 20 February 1954, at a meeting the Gisborne Athletic Club had laid on with the record in mind. The weather had been waited for. The wind had to be inside the legal limit of two metres per second, and it was. Her parents, Tom and Winnie, had flown up from Dunedin to watch. The crowd was small, by international standards, but every Gisborne sports official who could be there was there.
She jumped 6.29 metres. It was four centimetres beyond Fanny Blankers-Koen’s eleven-year-old world record of 6.25 metres, set in Leiden in 1943. She was now, definitively, the world’s best long jumper. She gave the New Zealand Press Association the line they had been waiting for since 1952. “I knew I would be able to break it,” she said. “I was only 1cm off it at the Olympics two years ago.”
It was, in 1954 New Zealand, an unusually self-confident sentence for a young woman to give a microphone. It was also accurate. Her record stood until 1956, when the Polish jumper Elzbieta Krzesinska surpassed it with 6.35 metres, having equalled it the year before.
The Bellwood debt
This is the place to say what is too often left unsaid in the Williams story. The single most important figure in her career, after her own talent and her own work, was Jim Bellwood. The second most important was Emmy Bellwood. Williams was not a self-coached prodigy. She was the product of a coaching partnership that took her, over seven years, from a promising club shot putter to a triple Empire Games gold medallist and the world long jump record holder. The hitch-kick was Bellwood’s teaching. The sandhill conditioning at St Clair was Bellwood’s programme. The morning calisthenics were Emmy’s. The move to Auckland for the 1952 build-up was Bellwood’s call, and Williams’ agreement with it.
It has not been the New Zealand sporting habit to credit the coach. The 1950s sports press preferred its athletes self-made and laconic, and Williams had the laconic side, but the public story of Yvette Williams without the Bellwoods is incomplete. The athlete was the athlete. The coaching was the coaching. The two together were unbeatable in the British Empire of 1950 to 1954.
Buddy, and the four children
Buddy Corlett was, like Williams, a New Zealand basketball representative. Born on 11 November 1921, he was more than seven years her senior, and by his children’s later account a quiet, kind, deeply uncompetitive man in private, the unflashy contrast to the public Yvette. They met in Auckland in the years between Helsinki and Vancouver.
In November 1954, a few months after Vancouver, Williams announced her retirement from international competition at 25. Helsinki, Gisborne and Vancouver had been the three things she had asked of herself. She had done them. She wanted to start a family. She married Buddy Corlett in Auckland on 11 December 1954.
The four children — Neville, Peter, Karen and Bruce — followed in the next eight years. Each in turn came back to sport, in the way the children of unusually athletic parents do. Neville played basketball for New Zealand. Peter, the second son, was the New Zealand junior decathlon champion and played provincial rugby for Auckland. Karen represented New Zealand in rhythmic gymnastics at the 1977 World Championships. Yvette’s brother Roy Williams, meanwhile, had grown into the country’s best decathlete, and won the 1966 Empire Games decathlon at Kingston, Jamaica.
The long quiet Auckland life
Yvette Corlett, as she preferred to be called from December 1954 onwards, lived the rest of her life in Auckland. She worked as a bookkeeper, and later taught physical education for 15 years at Otahuhu College and Diocesan School for Girls. She did sports administration. She gave talks at school assemblies and Rotary Clubs and women’s clubs. She was, by the testimony of every interviewer who met her between 1955 and 2015, almost invariably warm, slightly self-deprecating, and ferociously polite about anything that touched on her own past. The interviewer who came in expecting the conquering hero went away with detailed answers about her grandchildren.
She stayed in touch with the Bellwoods until Jim’s death in 1994 and Emmy’s afterwards.
She was named, in 1987, on Athletics New Zealand’s centenary, the country’s “athlete of the century”. She was inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1990. She was voted Otago Sportsperson of the Century in 2000. She was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2011 New Year Honours. A Dunedin retirement village in Roslyn, above the city she grew up in, was named the Yvette Williams Retirement Village. And in 2013 the New Zealand Olympic Committee established the Yvette Williams Scholarship, founded with a $500,000 gift from Sir Owen Glenn, to assist young athletes of exceptional talent and financial need.
Buddy Corlett died on 9 May 2015. Yvette outlived him by almost four years, and was visibly diminished by his death, by the family’s account. She continued, into her late 80s, to give the occasional television interview. The interviews, on archive, are gentle. The giggle her authorised biographer Walker described — “sociable, laughing and having fun” — is unmistakable. The eyes are the same eyes that were on the cinder at Helsinki.
She died in Auckland on 13 April 2019, aged 89, twelve days short of her ninetieth birthday. Her promotion to Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to athletics, had been signed to take effect from 12 April 2019, the day before her death, and was announced in the Queen’s Birthday Honours on 3 June 2019. Her brother Roy said the family was “quite thrilled and excited” by the honour. Her daughter Karen Corlett received the insignia on her mother’s behalf at a ceremony in July 2020, wearing her mother’s Olympic blazer.
What she was, and was not
The temptation, with Williams, is to round her down to one figure. The first New Zealand woman to win Olympic gold. The first New Zealand field athlete to win Olympic gold. The Helsinki long jumper. The 6.24 metres. The narrative tidies her into a dramatic single jump on a single afternoon in a single Finnish stadium. It is, on the strict facts, accurate. It is also a serious diminution of what she was.
What she was was one of the most complete field athletes New Zealand has ever produced. Twenty-one national titles across five disciplines. Olympic gold and two more top-ten finishes at the same Games. An Empire Games gold and silver as a 20-year-old. An Empire Games triple gold four years later, two of the three won simultaneously, a hundred metres apart, on 12 shoe changes. A world record taken from the most famous female athlete in the world, on a windless February afternoon at a small Gisborne ground arranged for the purpose. And a retirement, at 25, into a family life she had decided she also wanted, before her body or her form had been forced into the decision.
What she was not was a finished story. The career was short. The body of competitive evidence runs from 1947 to 1954, a window of eight seasons. In that window she rose to dominate her sport globally, and her world record outlived her retirement, standing until 1956. The argument for putting her, on lifetime achievement, in the same New Zealand sporting bracket as Snell or Lovelock is the argument that you do not need to be the longest-lived to be the most accomplished. You need to have been, for a meaningful period, the best in the world. Williams was.
She was also capable of considerable steel. She trained on a southern beach where the wind blows almost without pause. She lifted home-made concrete blocks before work. She organised her whole life, for seven years, around being the best in the world at something. The polite, slightly self-deprecating Auckland matron of the post-1955 years was not the whole picture. The Caversham child who ran the hill a little further every day had not gone away. She had simply finished.
The line of descent
The hitch-kick that Williams flew with in Helsinki is now part of the standard technique of the event. The wider New Zealand tradition of women’s Olympic champions — Barbara Kendall, Beatrice Faumuina, Valerie Adams, Lisa Carrington — runs in a direct line of descent from Williams. She was the first New Zealand woman to win an Olympic gold, the first New Zealander to win a field event of any kind, and the first to make it look, on the long view, ordinary. The forty-year gap between her 1952 gold and Kendall’s 1992 windsurfing gold says something more about the rest of the New Zealand sports system than about Williams.
What the Helsinki record tells you, when you read the actual margins, is the gap she opened. She jumped 10 centimetres further than the woman who came second, on a sprained knee, after two fouls. Modern Olympic long jump finals are often settled by margins of a few centimetres. Williams was operating at a different level to her field, with a different methodology, against a technical problem the rest of the world had not yet recognised was solvable.
The Caversham hill
The hill on which the small Yvette ran a little further every day still climbs out of South Dunedin. The St Clair sandhills still slip away under the foot. And in Roslyn, on the slopes above the city centre, a retirement village carries the name of the girl from Caversham who ran up hills until she was the best in the world.
Sources and further reading
- Angela Walker, Ideals are like Stars: The Dame Yvette Williams Story (Beatnik Publishing, 2022) — the authorised biography
- World Athletics, “I knew I would be able to break it” — 70 years since Williams leapt beyond Blankers-Koen
- World Athletics, 1952 Olympic long jump champion Williams dies
- Athletics New Zealand, Obituary — Yvette Williams CNZM MBE
- Otago Daily Times, Otago sporting legend dies (April 2019)
- Stuff, The Estonian refugee who helped mould Kiwi Olympic legend Yvette Corlett
- NZ Herald, The stuff of champions: Yvette Corlett
- Now to Love, Beloved Olympian Dame Yvette Williams’ lasting legacy
- Wikipedia, Yvette Williams and 1952 women’s long jump
- Olympedia, Yvette Williams
- DigitalNZ, Yvette Williams, our 1st female gold Olympian, 1952
More from the Great New Zealanders series
This is part of Newswire’s Great New Zealanders series, which profiles people whose lives shaped this country. Other recent profiles include Jean Batten, the New Zealand aviator whose records disappeared, Charles Upham, the reluctant legend who won the Victoria Cross twice, and Bruce McLaren, the Auckland boy who built a Formula One team.
Have something to add
Did your grandparents listen to the Helsinki Olympics on a wireless set in 1952 in a Caversham kitchen? Did your mother train at Caledonian Ground or run on the St Clair sandhills with the Bellwoods’ squad? Do you remember the day in February 1954 when the Gisborne Athletic Club laid on a meeting for one woman to break a world record? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply