Swimming · 1964 · Tokyo, Japan
Fraser's Historic Three-Peat
Swimming months after a car crash that killed her mother and left her in a neck brace, Dawn Fraser wins the 100m freestyle at a third consecutive Olympics.
59.5s (Olympic record)
Time
3 (1956, 1960, 1964)
Consecutive 100m freestyle golds
0.4 seconds
Margin of victory
Dawn Fraser had already won the 100m freestyle at the 1956 Melbourne and 1960 Rome Olympics, becoming the first woman to swim the distance under a minute along the way. Months before the 1964 Tokyo Games, a car accident killed her mother and left Fraser with a neck injury serious enough to threaten her participation entirely.
She competed anyway, wearing a neck brace between events, and won the 100m freestyle final in an Olympic record 59.5 seconds, holding off the American Sharon Stouder by four tenths of a second. No swimmer in Olympic history had won the same individual event at three consecutive Games.
Only a small handful of swimmers have matched it since, across both the men's and women's programmes. What gets remembered alongside the swim is what she was carrying into the pool that week.
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