“We were put into lanes at the start. I didn’t even know at what stage we could cut in, so I had to watch the other athletes to see when they were doing it. I struggled but I got through the heat and the semi.”
The slowest of eight qualifiers, few expected Packer to feature at the front end of the field in the final.
Packer says: “Robbie thought I had a chance, and there was an Indian 400m runner, Milka Singh, who I bumped into in the lift. He said, ‘you will win’. And he was right.”
Packer’s plan to be in touch with the leaders with 200m remaining may have been stretched to the limit, but her sprinting pedigree enabled her to reel them in on the final bend before overhauling Frenchwoman Maryvonne Dupureur just metres from the line.
“I never dreamt of winning a medal so it was completely out of the blue. It was a surprise to me as much as David Coleman. His commentary was so spontaneous.
“In every Olympics someone will pop up and astound the world, and it was me in Tokyo.”
Not only was Packer’s time of two minutes 1.1 seconds a new world best, but it was some 11 seconds quicker than she had run in the heat.
“I wasn’t sure what to do when I won because it was so unexpected,” she remembers. “If you ask me what I was feeling, it was relief that I finally got my gold medal.”
There was no celebratory lap of honour. Instead, in scenes again more familiar with school sports field than Olympic stadium, she ran into the arms of Brightwell, who was still on the track after the men’s 4x400m relay.
