Dorothy Jennifer Beatrice Tyler, MBE was a British athlete who competed mainly in the high jump. She was born in Stockwell, London. Odam competed for Great Britain in the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, Germany where she won the silver medal behind Ibolya Cs�k. She jumped the highest and was the first to clear 1.60 meters, and would have won under modern countback rules, but under the 1936 rulebook a jump-off was called for, and Cs�k won the gold. In 1939 she broke the world record in the high jump with 1.66m, but Germany's Dora Ratjen broke her record quickly. Odam was suspicious of Ratjen and, according to Odam, "They wrote to me telling me I didn't hold the record, so I wrote to them saying, 'She's not a woman, she's a man'. They did some research and found 'her' serving as a waiter called Hermann Ratjen. So I got my world record back." Odam's world record was formally recognized by the sport's world governing body, the IAAF, in 1957. She won the silver medal again in the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, making her the only woman to win Olympic athletics medals before and after the war. 

March 14th, 1920 in London Borough of Lambeth  /  Died:   Sep 25th, 2014