Less than a tenth of a second separated the first five women to breast the tape in the final of the women’s 80m hurdles at the 1936 Olympic Games. It took the judges half an hour of studying photographs to resolve the minor medal placings, but there was never any doubt about the winner. Captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl with her arms wide and head thrown back as she floats across the line, Ondina Valla had become the first Italian woman to take Olympic gold — and she was an instant heroine of the Fascist movement.
Mussolini’s Italy had an ambivalent attitude to female participation in sport. When the talents of the ten-year-old Trebisonda Valla were first noted, her own mother at first forbade her to continue running, and it was only her father’s support that allowed her to begin supervised training.
Valla became an athletics prodigy. At 14 she won the national women’s championships in the hurdles and the high jump, and also competed in the sprints, long jump and pentathlon. In 1932, aged 16, she was selected for the Los Angeles Olympics, but did not travel after the Church objected to her being the only woman on the team boat.
The following year, though not a student, she was sent to compete in the World University Games in Paris, and won three events.
Valla had started to gain support in the sporting press, who shortened her unwieldy forename to Ondina, or “little wave”, supposedly because of the way that she flowed over the hurdles. Soon she came under the wing of the men’s team coach, the American Boyd Comstock.
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Valla arrived in Berlin relatively unheralded, but that all changed when she equalled the world record of 11.6sec in the semi-final of the hurdles. Belatedly she was taken up by the Fascists as a symbol of modern Italian womanhood, an acclaim to which she was not averse.
She was presented with her medal by Hitler, but was much more delighted to be received by Mussolini on returning to Rome. Even the Pope wanted to meet her. She was given 5,000 lire and a post in the Fascist Party’s offices in her hometown of Bologna, where she had been born in 1916.
Her career began to decline, however, after her triumph in Berlin. In 1944 she married Guglielmo De Lucchi, an orthopaedic surgeon, and soon afterwards retired from athletics.
She had won 23 national titles, and as well as setting new levels of excellence in Italian women’s athletics, had become an inspiring example of female emancipation for many of her countrywomen.
She is survived by a son.
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Ondina Valla, athlete, was born on May 20, 1916. She died on October 15, 2006, aged 90