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Marlies Gohr was consistently at, or near the top of the 100m world
rankings for over a decade, during which time she won many medals as a
sprinter at major international championships, and set several world
records. Competing under her maiden name of Oelsner, Marlies finished
second in the 100m in her first major international at the 1975 European
Junior Championships in Athens. The following year, at the 1976
Olympic Games in Montreal, she finished 8th in the 100m final, but went
on to win her first Olympic gold medal as the lead runner on East
Germany's victorious 4 x 100m relay team. Marlies made a major
improvement in 1977, winning her first East German 100m title at Dresden
on 1 July in a new world record time of 10.88sec, to become the first
woman to record an electronic time under 11 seconds.
Later that year,
she had no trouble in winning the 100m at the inaugural World Cup in
Dusseldorf, where she also won a silver medal in the relay. Marlies
continued to dominate in 1978, and in that year's European Championships
in Prague, competing under her married name of Gohr, she won the gold
medal in the 100m, and was just beaten (0.01sec) out of a second gold
medal in the 200m by Lyudmila Kondratyeva (Soviet Union). However, in
the 4 x 100m relay, the identical East German squad, anchored by Gohr,
which had set a new world record of 42.27sec only two weeks earlier,
could only manage a third place finish in the final. In 1979, Gohr
anchored two more reductions of the 4 x 100m relay world record by East
German teams, but at the World Cup in Montreal, she was beaten into
second place in the 100m by USA sprinter Evelyn Ashford, who had
recently emerged as a world-class sprinter. (Ron Casey)
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