100 Olympic Tidbits: The Most Bemedalled Female Track Athlete
Which female athlete has won the most Olympic track and field medals? Florence Griffith-Joyner? Nope. Jackie Joyner-Kersee? Wrong again. The answer is Merlene Ottey-Page, who won nine medals through the course of five Olympiads.
Ottey-Page won all her medals competing for Jamaica, although she became a Slovenian citizen in 2002. her medal haul spanned 20 years, beginning with a solitary bronze in the 1980 Moscow Olympics and ending with a silver and a bronze in the 2000 Sydney Games. In between, she only missed out on a medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Her seven Olympic appearances - she also competed in the 2004 Athens – is also a record for all Olympic female athletes.
The one big knock on Ottey-Page’s career is that none of her nine medals was of the gold variety. All in all she won three silvers and six bronzes, and the closest she ever got to a gold medal was in the Atlanta Olympics 100m dash, where she lost out to Gail Devers by five-thousandths of a second. She also settled for the silver in the women’s 200m in Atlanta and in the 4x100m relay in Sydney.
Editor's Note: To celebrate the 100-day countdown to the London Games, we will be publishing 100 tidbits about the Olympics. Come back to Yahoo! PH Sports, as we publish a new tidbit every day.
