Barbara Beable (née Poulsen) had a fine international athletics career, but missed what promised to be her moment of glory.

Beable, in her third Commonwealth Games, was on target for a medal in the pentathlon at Edmonton in 1978 after a gruelling two days of competition. But in the final event, the 800m, she fell to the ground 150 metres from the finish line, suffering from dehydration.

Her vision blurred, she got up, fell down again, crawled, staggered a few more metres, fell again and crawled and finally reached the finish line, but by then she’d slipped to fifth place overall. She was carried from the field on a stretcher.

It was a hot day, 35 degrees at 5pm when the 800m was run. But Beable, an experienced athlete, had never had a problem with dehydration and after all this was two laps, not a marathon.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I knew it was going to be my final competition and I’d gone well. I wouldn’t have beaten Diane [Jones-Konihowski], but I’d been second all day. We went at a good pace in the 800m, but I was still handling it comfortably. I guess it was one of those things, but it was a terrible time for it to happen and a very disappointing way to end my international career.”

Beable’s travails had echoes of the falls of middle-distance runners Marise Stephen (nee Chamberlain) in 1966 and Sylvia Potts in 1970.

Barbara, born in Christchurch in 1949, was a fine all-round athlete who prospered under the coaching eye of Valdy Briedis from when she was only 13. By the age of 16 she’d won her first New Zealand pentathlon title and was competing on the international stage.

At the 1970 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, Poulsen, as she was then, went close to winning a gold medal in the shot put. In the end, her best effort of 15.87m fell just short of gold medallist Mary Peters of Northern Ireland, who had 15.93m.

By Christchurch in 1974, Poulsen was competing in both the shot put and the pentathlon.

In the shot put, she was fifth with 14.60m. She filled the same position in the pentathlon with 4158 points, some distance behind Peters’ total of 4455. Peters won the gold medal in that event in the 1972 Munich Olympics. The New Zealander’s best performances in the pentathlon were 14.41s in the 100m hurdles and 14.84m in the shot put.

Beable seemed sure to be picked for the pentathlon for the 1976 Montreal Olympics, in which she was ranked 4th in the world, but was surprisingly overlooked.

In Edmonton, Canadian Jones-Konihowski won the pentathlon with 4768 points. Beable, as she was by then, after her sad end to the final event, ended up with 3989 points.

Beable won 16 senior national titles from 1966-78 – nine in the pentathlon and seven in the shot put.

She and husband Mike, both long-time athletics coaches after they finished their competitive careers, lived in Wellington for many years. Barbara had 26 years at Queen Margaret College as head of department for physical education. She was also a conditioning coach for the Wellington Shakers netball team.

The Beables moved to Wanaka in 2016 and continued their coaching efforts with a whole new batch of athletes

Barbara Beable

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Biography

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