Swimming · 1964 · Tokyo, Japan
Fraser's Historic Three-Peat
Swimming just months after a car crash that killed her mother and left her in a neck brace, Dawn Fraser wins the 100m freestyle for an unprecedented 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 American Sharon Stouder by four tenths of a second. It made her the first swimmer in Olympic history to win the same individual event at three consecutive Games.
The achievement, since matched by only a small handful of swimmers across both the men's and women's programmes, is remembered as much for the personal circumstances surrounding it as for the swim itself, a champion competing through grief and injury to complete a feat no one had managed before her.
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