Marea Hartman - Eminent Sports Administrator

Eminent Sports Administrator

Marea Hartman was one of the few women that also included Dorette Nelson Neal and Vera Searle who reached senior positions in the male dominated world of post-war British athletics. She was appointed team manager of the British women's team for the Melbourne Olympic Games of 1956, holding this position until 1978, a period that encompassed five Olympic Games and a host of other important meetings including the European championships and the Commonwealth Games. In the 1950s female athletics had little or no media profile, and it is to Hartman's credit that she was able to secure sponsorship deals with a number of manufacturers of well-known brands, including Unilever products Bovril and Sunsilk.

Hartman was insistent on equality for women athletes, arguing for their participation in a range of events that had previously been denied to them, and she successfully navigated the sometimes reactionary world of British amateur athletics with skill and sociability. In latter years some athletes saw her as a conservative figure, and in the late 1970s she and fellow sports administrator Arthur Gold were the subject of some fierce criticism from sections of the press primed by elements within British athletics. It was essentially the new guard versus the old, with Hartman seen by some as part of the reactionary old guard.

Pierre de Coubertin's spirit of participation was a principle in which Hartman believed (she was never a paid official, carrying out her functions within the sport in an honorary capacity without remuneration), but once she realised that professionalism was not going away, she argued for the notion of equality for women athletes in the professional era. In her younger years she was well suited to her role as Team Manager, where she often had to reassure nervously strung international athletes. She was closely associated with the historic triumphs of Mary Rand and Ann Packer at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. After Lillian Board, the 400 metre silver medalist at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Hartman was with Board in Munich shortly before she died in 1970. Hartman was instrumental in the setting up a memorial trophy, the Lillian Board Trophy, awarded each year for outstanding fundraising for cancer.

Hartman was selected Chairwoman of the Women's Commission of the IAAF in 1968, a post she held until 1981. As Honorary Secretary of the Women's AAA she campaigned against the use of stimulants and performance enhancing drugs, and was a founder member of the Drugs Abuse Sub-Committee as far back as 1968. When British athletics administration received a much needed overhaul in 1991, Hartman became President of the British Athletics Federation.

She never married or had children.