🇵🇹 Rosa Mota

Rosa Maria Correia dos Santos Mota was born on 29 June 1958 in Foz Velha, an old downtown neighbourhood of Porto. She began running cross-country races as a schoolgirl and showed early promise on the track at shorter distances before the marathon, then only just opening to women, became her event. In 1980 she met the coach Jose Pedrosa, who would guide her for the whole of her career.

Her first marathon could hardly have been better timed. At the 1982 European Championships in Athens, the first time a women's marathon had been held at a major championship, Mota won the gold medal. A debutante had become a continental champion in the discipline's inaugural showcase.

Two years later, the women's marathon entered the Olympics for the first time, at Los Angeles in 1984. Mota took the bronze medal in that historic race, behind Joan Benoit and Grete Waitz, the two biggest names in the sport, announcing that she belonged at the very top.

The second half of the 1980s belonged to her. She retained her European title in 1986 in Stuttgart, then won the World Championship marathon in Rome in 1987. By the time she reached Seoul, she was the European and World champion, and her victory there in 1988 completed an unprecedented treble: simultaneous holder of the European, World and Olympic marathon crowns.

Her Seoul win also made her the first sportswoman from Portugal to win an Olympic gold of any kind, a national milestone. She added a second European title in Split in 1990, becoming the first woman to win three European marathon championships, and the first to collect multiple Olympic marathon medals.

The numbers underline how dominant and consistent she was. Between 1982 and 1992 she ran twenty-one marathons and won fourteen of them, an extraordinary win rate over a full decade at the sport's most demanding distance. She combined that with relative durability, racing roughly twice a year and rarely fading.

Mota raced with a deceptively undramatic style, patient and economical, then decisive in the closing stages, where her late surges became a trademark. She was small, unassuming and famously down to earth, and Portugal embraced her as a national heroine without her ever seeking the role.

After retiring she remained an admired public figure and an advocate for sport. The Association of International Marathons and Distance Races distinguished her, at its thirtieth-anniversary gala, as the greatest female marathon runner of all time, a verdict her unmatched run of championship golds in the 1980s makes hard to dispute.