On the eve of starting her quest for a gold medal in the 800m at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Ann Packer told her fiancé Robbie Brightwell that she might go shopping instead.
Packer had been favourite to win gold in the 400m but was beaten into second place by Betty Cuthbert of Australia. She had only ever run two domestic 800m races and would be the slowest qualifier for the final. In any case, she wanted to buy presents for her family back home and time was running out. Brightwell, who was devastated to have finished fourth in the men’s 400m final, put his fiancée right.
“Shopping? You must be mad. Shopping? This is the Olympic Games, not the Moulsford village sports!” said Brightwell, who was captain of Great Britain’s athletics squad. “Think about the British girls back home who would have given their eyeteeth to be here in your place.”
Having “thrown his wobbly”, Brightwell and Packer felt the ground under their feet shaking from an earth tremor. Brightwell added: “Someone else has just reinforced what I’ve just said.”
Days later in the final, Packer started to sprint through the field with 150m to go and took the lead in the home straight to win gold for Great Britain in a world record of 2.01.1 minutes; it made her the first British woman to win an Olympic track title. After breaking the tape, she did not stop running until she had reached the arms of her fiancé. He could, after all, reasonably claim some responsibility for her victory.
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He also advised her to watch out for the “kick finish” of New Zealand’s Marise Chamberlain so that when she made her move Packer should follow. “The advice was just perfect,” Packer recalled.
Looking back on the race in an interview with The Times in 2020, Brightwell said: “Ann’s win marked a revolution in women’s distance running because for the first time the 800m became a sprint event.” Brightwell would also go on to make the most of his second chance in Tokyo and clearly took inspiration from Packer when running the anchor leg in the 4x400m relay, going past athletes from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in the last 50m to win a silver medal for Great Britain with team-mates Tim Graham, Adrian Metcalfe and John Cooper.
Having both experienced triumphs and disasters at the same Games, Packer and Brightwell became known as British athletics’ “golden couple”. Six months later they were married.
Robert Ian Brightwell was born in 1939 in Rawalpindi, British India (the city is today in Pakistan) and was brought up in Donnington, Telford, Shropshire. He only took up running as a teenager after reading about the Olympics in a library but was an instant success, winning the 220 yards at the English schools championship, and maintained his strict running regime while doing teacher training at Shrewsbury Technical College. He would go on to work as a sports teacher at Tiffin School in Kingston upon Thames and then became a lecturer at Loughborough College in Leicestershire, where he met Packer, who was doing a course.
Tall and lithe with a “go faster” wave in his close-cropped brown hair, Brightwell reached the semi-finals of his debut Olympics in Rome, in 1960, setting a British record of 46.1 seconds and just failing to reach the final. He won two silver medals at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia; he had been favourite for the 400m and was only denied gold because of an attack of dysentery on the eve of the final. One compensation was that he and Packer got engaged during the Games.
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He won 400m gold at the European Championships in Belgrade that same year in 45.6 seconds, 0.2 seconds outside the world record — a time that would put him among Britain’s elite runners at the distance today, if not perhaps in world class any more. He went to Tokyo in 1964 hotly tipped to bring home a medal, perhaps even gold. In the Olympic 400m final he ran the first 200m too fast and faded in the home straight to finish fourth. David Coleman, commentating for the BBC, had Packer sitting alongside him, ready to hand her the microphone when Brightwell crossed the line in a medal-winning position. “When he finished fourth it was so unexpected that she started crying and I couldn’t put her on,” Coleman later recalled. “She was in full flood, mascara running down her face, and she said, ‘Never mind David, I’ll get a gold for Robbie tomorrow.’ And so she did.”
Brightwell, who had trained ferociously for what he knew would be his final race, felt embittered that his preparations had been disrupted by arguments with the British Amateur Athletic Board after it had refused the British team’s self-funded athletes a share of the fees from the television coverage of the training camp that Brightwell had set up in Hampshire. He was a deep thinker about coaching techniques and helped to devise the training schedules that delivered Great Britain’s best Olympic performance of the modern era — four golds, seven silvers and one bronze. Indeed, Great Britain came third in the track and field events medals table behind the US and the Soviet Union. He retired from athletics after the Tokyo Games and both he and his wife were appointed MBE in 1965.
The couple eventually settled in Congleton, Cheshire. He worked as a director at Adidas and Le Coq Sportif. In an era before lottery funding supported the best British prospects, many up-and-coming athletes relied on Brightwell’s munificence to kit them out. Dave Moorcroft, who would go on to break the world record in the 5,000m, recalled: “I got my first free Adidas gear from Robbie and John Cooper when I was 18 — I thought all my Christmases had come at once.”
His wife survives him with their three sons, Gary, a businessman, Ian and David, who both played professional football for Manchester City.
The Brightwells continued to run together into old age.
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Robbie Brightwell MBE, athlete, was born on October 27, 1939. He died after a long illness on March 6, 2022, aged 82