Athletes who fell in love after meeting on flight to 1964 Tokyo Olympics advise participants to make ‘good memories’
Cyclist Hugh Porter and swimmer Anita Lonsbrough married a year after meeting on a flight to Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics
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Your support makes all the difference.Two athletes who fell in love after meeting on a flight to Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics have urged the participants in the Games to make “good memories”.
Cyclist Hugh Porter and swimmer Anita Lonsbrough, who went on to win numerous gold medals as they reached the top of their respective sports, married a year after meeting on the flight.
In an interview with the BBC, the couple shared their wisdom as they asked the athletes to “absorb everything”.
The word of advice from the couple comes as it was during these Games in the same city about 56 years ago, that they met and fell in love. “I couldn’t sleep so I walked to the front of the plane to have a chat with some of the modern pentathlon boys who I knew from Rome,” Ms Lonsborough had told the Express and Star in a 2015 interview.
“I got talking to Hugh and after a while, he asked me to join him for breakfast. We met up at the opening ceremony but it was difficult keeping in touch during the games because the cyclists were based miles outside of Tokyo.
“But I managed to watch him compete and the relationship grew from there.”
She joked in another interview that she won the gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics and a husband four years later.
Ms Lonsborough also described her experience of being chosen to carry the national flag of her country at the opening ceremony of the 1964 Olympics. She was the first British woman athlete to be a flag bearer.
“Suddenly you walk into this vast arena and the noise just hits you,” she told the BBC. “I wanted to turn around and run back, but you don’t obviously you just march on and it really was a great honour.”
Her husband, Mr Porter, also rose to the top of the cycling world after landing four World Championship gold medals between 1968 and 1973. He also won a gold at the 1966 Commonwealth Games.
Mr Porter was, however, eliminated in a quarter final of the 1964 Games.
“I’d got a very heavy cold and bronchial chest infection which really is not the thing you want if you’re going to try and win an Olympic medal,” he told the BBC.
But the games gave them an opportunity to know each other better. “Hugh, he invited me, last of the big spenders, to a hot breakfast with him on the last leg,” shared Ms Lonsbrough. “He told his team manager to move so I could sit next to him.”
Mr Porter said that he was concerned about the impact of the pandemic on the players. “They are going to be housed in a hotel or in a village, they are not going to be able to go out, I don’t know how they are going to do their training and all that.”
He added that he feels “sorry” for the players because he is unsure “whether or not they’ll be able to give their best shot”.
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