Sprinter Nancy (née Murrall) Mackay earned a spot as a spare on the Canadian women’s track team for the 1948 Olympics.Courtesy of family
Nancy Mackay, one of Canada’s top sprinters in the 1930s, had her dream of Olympic competition dashed when the 1940 Games were cancelled by war.
Ms. Mackay (who then went by Murrall, her maiden name) retired from competitive running and got married. Her decision seemed prudent when the Second World War also led to the cancellation of the next scheduled quadrennial games.
By the time the Olympics returned in 1948 after a 12-year absence, Ms. Mackay was back on the track. She earned a spot as a spare on the Canadian women’s track team. Just 24 hours before the women’s relays were to be run, an injury to a Canadian runner at last gave Ms. Mackay a chance to compete against the world’s best.
What she and her team achieved was one of the rare bright moments for Canadian Olympic athletes in the postwar years.
Ms. Mackay, who has died at 101, set national intermediate records as a schoolgirl sprinter, including completing the 75-yard dash in 8.8 seconds in 1939. A year earlier, she had shared in the national intermediate record for the 400-metre relay with a time of 49.6 seconds.
Running for Lakeside Ladies’ Athletic Club in Toronto under coach Ab Foster, she won numerous provincial and national titles as an intermediate, junior and senior sprinter.
In 1940 and 1941, she won the 100-yard dash in her age category at the popular track and field championships held annually at the Canadian National Exhibition.
She gave up track after marrying Robert Mackay, who would become an advertising executive specializing in automobiles. After a two-year hiatus, she returned to competition in 1944 with the Laurel Ladies’ Track Club, winning the 440-yard relay at the U.S. national championships in 1945. She again won that title with the Malvernettes club the following year. Once again considering retirement, she instead decided to try to qualify for the first postwar Olympics.
In 1948, a bottle drive raised $165 for Ms. Mackay and two amateur teammates to attend the Canadian Olympic trials in Montreal.
After the competition, the selection committee failed to name her to the team. Other Toronto runners, notably Viola Myers, threatened to leave the team unless she was included. Ms. Mackay was one of three late additions to the 104-athlete Canadian contingent.
The 1948 Olympics are remembered as the Austerity Games, as London still endured rationing and shortages, and had yet to be rebuilt following the devastation of wartime bombing.
For Ms. Mackay, it was also a homecoming. She had been born in the industrial town of Smethwick, just west of Birmingham, on May 16, 1922. Two years later, her parents, Annie and Thomas Ernest Murrall, a tool setter, sailed to Canada aboard the steamship Montroyal, whose passengers included the lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, though most of those sailing in third-class with the Murralls were seeking to become farmers on the prairies. The young family settled in Oshawa, Ont., where her father found sporadic factory work assembling engines during the Depression.
Returning to England as an extra sprinter with Canada’s national team at 1948 Olympics, Ms. Mackay was pressed into service on the 4-by-100-metre relay team in place of the ailing Millie Cheater of Vancouver. Joined by Ms. Myers of Toronto, Diane Foster of Vancouver, and Patricia Jones of New Westminster, B.C., the quartet won a semi-final heat in 47.9 seconds to beat teams from Australia, France and Brazil.
The Canadians were medal hopefuls, as Ms. Myers had finished fourth and Ms. Jones fifth in the 100-metre sprint, both trailing the remarkable Fanny Blankers-Koen, the 30-year-old Dutch athlete and mother of two known as the “Flying Housewife.”
In the finals, the Canadians got off to a fast start. Ms. Mackay, running second, would be told by an official after the race that her leg was the fastest for the Canadians. By the time of the final baton exchange, Ms. Jones trailed only Shirley Strickland of Australia. Then, the great Dutch runner streaked past them both on the anchor leg to claim her fourth gold medal of the Games.
The Canadians finished in 47.8 seconds, two-tenths slower than Australia and three-tenths slower than the victorious Dutch.
The bronze medal was Canada’s first at those Games. Two male canoeists would later win a silver and a bronze.
The third-place finish earned the runners a place on the podium.
“We were so proud when the Canadian flag was raised that we could hardly keep still,” Ms. Mackay said at the time.
It would be another 36 years before Canadian women again won Olympic medals in track, as Lynn Williams took a bronze in the 3,000 metres at the Los Angeles Games on Aug. 10, 1984, while the Canadian team of Angela Bailey, Marita Payne, Angella Taylor-Issajenko and France Gareau claimed the silver in the 4-by-100 relay the following day.
Ms. Mackay and her relay teammates were among the handful of Canadian summer athletes to appear in the documentary film, XIVth Olympiad: The Glory of Sport. The movie was released a few weeks after the conclusion of the Games.
After retiring from sport for good, Ms. Mackay worked in a government office, as well as raising a family.
She died at home in Bowmanville, Ont., on Jan. 4. She leaves a son, a daughter, two grandsons and great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by her husband, who died in 1987 after 45 years of marriage. At the time of her death, she was Canada’s oldest Canadian Summer Olympic medalist, a title now believed to be held by 95-year-old Tom Gayford, who won a gold medal with Jim Day and Jim Elder in equestrian team show jumping in Mexico City in 1968.
In 2011, Ms. Mackay was inducted into the Athletic Ontario Hall of Fame for her Olympic achievement.
In 1986, Ms. Mackay was one of the inaugural class of inductees into the Oshawa Sports Hall of Fame, alongside hockey’s Bobby Orr, who had played in the city as a teenager. The hall has displayed her running uniform, which features a bright red maple leaf on the chest.
She took comfort in knowing a standard she set at age 17 would keep her name in the record books forever.
“I still hold the 75-yard Canadian record and always will,” she told the Oshawa Express newspaper in 2008, “because they don’t run it anymore. Isn’t that great?”
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