The Australian Women's Register

Considering what the athletes had to endure in the lead up to the games, Edith Robinson’s effort in 1928, by anyone’s standards, was extraordinary. The Australian team travelled by ship for six weeks to get to Amsterdam and during this time, most of the team put on weight. ”We couldn’t train, we couldn’t even walk on the first class deck,’ Robinson reported in later years. ‘We weren’t even allowed to use the tiny canvas pool on board.’ The situation did not improve much once they arrived. The accommodation was more than twenty miles distant from where they could train, and training ‘sessions’ could last anything up to twelve hours once travel time was included. The Australians were also quite unhappy with the greasy, inappropriate meals they were served. According to Robinson, their best meals were often those prepared by women team members after they had arrived back late from training.

Robinson was also involved in an event that was so controversial, it was banned from the Olympics for the next thirty-two years. Despite never having trained for the event, let alone competed in it, Edith ran in the 800 meters, after her male team-mates encouraged her to enter. She pulled out, exhausted, at the 600 meter mark. Other women were similarly challenged, but this is hardly surprising; the 800 meters is one of the most strenuous events in track and field. Nevertheless, the sight of these physically drained women was too much for some Olympic officials. So adverse was the publicity in the press about the matter that no race longer than 200 meters was run by women at the Olympics until 1960. The fact that photographs that accompanied some of the more sensational press coverage of the event were actually of women completing heats of the 100 meters only serves to highlight the extent to which public understandings of feminine behaviour impacted upon female athletes ability to perform at their best.