From Athletics to Double Bass?
- A woman in athletics kit, in an immaculate sprint-start position ... on the front cover of "Early Music Today"???
Chi-Chi Nwanoku, the daughter of a Nigerian father and an Irish mother, was a high-standard sprinter,
expected to make the Nigerian team for the 1976 Olympics until an injury in a game of football wrecked her
athletics career. But not her life. She was also an excellent pianist: one of her teachers said to her
"you could probably make a career for yourself if you took up one of the less popular instruments. For
example, there's this double-bass here ...". Chi-chi, although little more than five feet tall, took to
the instrument with all the enthusiasm of her time in athletics, and is now a leading classical soloist,
and one of the world's leading authorities on the early history of the double-bass.
You can read more about Chi-Chi Nwanoku at
her Web Site.
- One athlete who did make the Olympics, Anne Pashley, a member of Britain's 1956 silver-medal winning Sprint Relay squad,
went on to become a leading soloist at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
- Perhaps more remarkably, the winner of the Women's Shot and Discus (and bronze medallist in the High Jump) at the 1948 London Olympics,
Micheline Ostermeyer of France, was an active concert pianist, who had graduated with the top prize from the Paris
Conservatoire of Music: she gave a Beethoven recital for her fellow athletes. It is scarcely likely that present-day athletics governing bodies, or musical
bigwigs for that matter, would tolerate such a combination of careers. Read more about her Here.