Remember the impressive distance by which Bolt won the 200 meters at the Beijing Olympics four years ago? Blankers-Koen did that and more.
Three sprint golds? Ditto.
She was 30, well past a sprinter's prime, at the 1948 London Games when she won four Olympic titles — a feat never repeated at one Games by any woman in track and field.
"Her contribution in London was extraordinary," said Sebastian Coe, the head of the London organizing committee and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.
"Fanny Blankers-Koen and Jesse Owens: they are on the same level," said Lamine Diack, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations.
As the July 27 opening ceremony closes in and the memories center on the first Olympics after World War II, Blankers-Koen's name and the initials F.B.K. will become familiar again. But delving into the past of a runner who died in 2004 at 85 will reveal more than a stunning array of records and titles. It also will show a woman driven by winning, sometimes at the cost of things many people consider closest to their hearts.
Shows of motherly love rarely came naturally to her.
"It is something my mother found very hard to do," said Fanny Blankers Jr., the second and youngest child of the Dutch athlete who became known as the Flying Housewife at the London Olympics.
Blankers-Koen's biographer said such a single-minded approach is a necessity for any champion for the ages.
"Fanny always was hard as nails," Kees Kooman said. "Otherwise, you cannot reach that exalted level."
And exalted it was.
Statuesque and powerful, Blankers-Koen was known for leg muscles strong as steel cords, compelling Kooman to call his biography "A Queen with Men's Legs." Whatever the description, her performances were jaw-dropping.
In the 200 meters in London, she drew the soggy inside lane, the worst for any sprinter because of the tighter bend. But she accelerated going into the final straight and won with what can now only be described as Boltian splendor. Such was her lead at the end that the camera could not capture the silver medalist in the same frame as Blankers-Koen crossed the line.
Bolt beat Wallace Spearmon by 0.66 seconds when he set a world record of 19.30 seconds in Beijing, but Blankers-Koen's edge over her British rival Audrey Williamson was 0.8 seconds.
The postwar years of deprivation and austerity, though, were not a time for Boltian bravado, especially for women, who were not treated as the equals of men on or off the track at the time.
What Blankers-Koen lacked in celebration — she bowed down to take a bunch of flowers before walking off the track — she made for up in significance.
"She moved the discussion on about the ability of women, particularly post World War II," Coe said. "A lot of things came together at the same time, particularly women who were taking up jobs that were often vacated by men" who did not survive the fighting. Women, Coe said, "were showing that they were physically the equals of those jobs when it was assumed that they were not."
After Owens had won four gold medals at the last Olympics before London, the Nazi-tainted 1936 Berlin Games, it was fitting that a woman took center stage by doing the same in 1948. She might have done more if Olympic rules had not limited her to three individual events and a relay; she also was the world-record holder in the long and high jump.
Diack, who was a successful long jumper before becoming an administrator, remembered Blankers-Koen from a half-century ago for what she meant in a broader sense.
"It is not only her performances; look at the signs of the times: she was a mother of a family, she had kids, and still she achieved all she did," Diack said. Her daughter, however, said that the grand schemes of equality were not important to her mother. Only being best, and first, counted.
"She wasn't a feminist," Blankers said. "She wanted to compete." But competing in itself was almost taking a stand at the time.
As much as she was stubborn, steadfast and cold to the outside world, she also was under the spell of her husband, Jan Blankers, who was 14 years her senior and her coach from a young age.
"She was insecure and depended a lot on him," Blankers said.
Fortunately, both husband and wife were equally driven by athletics.
Blankers remembered the hours she spent as a toddler sitting and playing in the long jump pit while her mother trained. Even though Jan Blankers was known to be at the forefront of coaching, the training was light years from current regimens.
Still, she had such natural talent, as 12 world records attest, that it is a pity time worked so much against her.
At the 1936 Olympics as an 18-year-old, she finished fifth in the high jump and the 4x100 relays. Her best years should have been the 1940 and 1944 Olympics, but they were canceled because of World War II.
Coe remembered that at the 1948 Games, the British amateur athletics association chief Jack Crump described her "as too old to compete."
Even so four years later, at the 1952 Helsinki Games, the 34-year-old seemed primed for more success. "She really was at her best, better than ever," Kooman said. "But she got boils, and the subsequent penicillin treatment did her in."
The frustration must have been agonizing. Blankers said her mother would never let go, even later in life.
"With her bike at a stoplight, she insisted on being the first off," Blankers sighed. "Cards, any game, she always wanted to win. The fanaticism, so tiring."
Diack still chuckles as he remembers when Blankers-Koen was voted the female athlete of the century by the I.A.A.F. in 1999 at a gala, five years before her death.
"I still remember she started dancing with happiness. She shouted, 'Is it really me?' and I said, 'Yes, madame, it's you.' "
The memories will come back as London closes in.
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