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Packer and Brightwell display their medals on their return from Tokyo in 1964On the eve of starting her quest for a
gold medal in the 800m at the 1964
Olympics in Tokyo, Ann Packer told
her fiancé Robbie Brightwell that she
might go shopping instead.
Packer had been favourite to win gold
in the 400m but was beaten into second
place by Betty Cuthbert of Australia.
She had only ever run two domestic
800m races and would be the slowest
qualifier for the final. In any case, she
wanted to buy presents for her family
back home and time was running out.
Brightwell, who was devastated to have
finished fourth in the men’s 400m final,
put his fiancée right.
“Shopping? You must be mad.
Shopping? This is the Olympic Games,
not the Moulsford village sports!” said
Brightwell, who was captain of Great
Britain’s athletics squad. “Think about
the British girls back home who would
have given their eyeteeth to be here in
your place.”
Having “thrown his wobbly”, Bright-
well and Packer felt the ground under
their feet shaking from an earth tremor.
Brightwell added: “Someone else has
just reinforced what I’ve just said.”
Days later in the final, Packer started
to sprint through the field with 150m to
go and took the lead in the home
straight to win gold for Great Britain in
a world record of 2.01.1 minutes; it made
her the first British woman to win an
Olympic track title. After breaking the
tape, she did not stop running until she
had reached the arms of her fiancé. He
could, after all, reasonably claim some
responsibility for her victory.
He also advised her to watch out for
the “kick finish” of New Zealand’s
Marise Chamberlain so that when she
made her move Packer should follow.
“The advice was just perfect,” Packer
recalled.
Looking back on the race in an inter-
view with The Times in 2020, Brightwell
said: “Ann’s win marked a revolution in
women’s distance running because for
tery on the eve of the final. One compen-
sation was that he and Packer got en-
gaged during the Games.
He won 400m gold at the European
Championships in Belgrade that same
year in 45.6 seconds, 0.2 seconds out-
side the world record — a time that
would put him among Britain’s elite
runners at the distance today, if not per-
haps in world class any more. He wentto Tokyo in 1964 hotly tipped to bring
home a medal, perhaps even gold. In
the Olympic 400m final he ran the first
200m too fast and faded in the home
straight to finish fourth. David Cole-
man, commentating for the BBC, had
Packer sitting alongside him, ready to
hand her the microphone when Bright-
well crossed the line in a medal-winning
position. “When he finished fourth itwas so unexpected that she started cry-
ing and I couldn’t put her on,” Coleman
later recalled. “She was in full flood, mas-
cara running down her face, and she
said, ‘Never mind David, I’ll get a gold for
Robbie tomorrow.’ And so she did.”
Brightwell, who had trained fero-
ciously for what he knew would be his
final race, felt embittered that his prep-
arations had been disrupted by argu-
ments with the British Amateur Athlet-
ic Board after it had refused the British
team’s self-funded athletes a share of
the fees from the television coverage of
the training camp that Brightwell had
set up in Hampshire. He was a deep
thinker about coaching techniques and
helped to devise the training schedules
that delivered Great Britain’s best
Olympic performance of the modern
era — four golds, seven silvers and one
bronze. Indeed, Great Britain came
third in the track and field events med-
als table behind the US and the Soviet
Union. He retired from athletics after
the Tokyo Games and both he and his
wife were appointed MBE in 1965.
The couple eventually settled in Con-
gleton, Cheshire. He worked as a direct-
or at Adidas and Le Coq Sportif. In an era
before lottery funding supported the
best British prospects, many up-and-
coming athletes relied on Brightwell’s
munificence to kit them out. Dave
Moorcroft, who would go on to break
the world record in the 5,000m, recalled:
“I got my first free Adidas gear from
Robbie and John Cooper when I was 18
— I thought all my Christmases had
come at once.”
His wife survives him with their three
sons, Gary, a businessman, Ian and
David, who both played professional
football for Manchester City.
The Brightwells continued to run to-
gether into old age.Robbie Brightwell MBE, athlete, was born
on October 27, 1939. He died after a long
illness on March 6, 2022, aged 82the first time the 800m became a sprint
event.” Brightwell would also go on to
make the most of his second chance in
Tokyo and clearly took inspiration
from Packer when running the anchor
leg in the 4x400m relay, going past ath-
letes from Jamaica and Trinidad and
Tobago in the last 50m to win a silver
medal for Great Britain with team-
mates Tim Graham, Adrian Metcalfe
and John Cooper.
Having both experienced triumphs
and disasters at the same Games, Pack-
er and Brightwell became known as
British athletics’ “golden couple”. Six
months later they were married.
Robert Ian Brightwell was born in
1939 in Rawalpindi, British India (the
city is today in Pakistan) and was
brought up in Donnington, Telford,
Shropshire. He only took up running as
a teenager after reading about the
Olympics in a library but was an instant
success, winning the 220 yards at the
English schools championship, and
maintained his strict running regimewhile doing teacher training at Shrews-
bury Technical College. He would go
on to work as a sports teacher at Tiffin
School in Kingston upon Thames and
then became a lecturer at Loughbor-
ough College in Leicestershire, where
he met Packer, who was doing a course.
Tall and lithe with a “go faster” wave in
his close-cropped brown hair, Bright-
well reached the semi-finals of his debut
Olympics in Rome, in 1960, setting a
British record of 46.1 seconds and just
failing to reach the final. He won two sil-
ver medals at the 1962 Commonwealth
Games in Perth, Australia; he had been
favourite for the 400m and was only de-
nied gold because of an attack of dysen-He threw a wobbly when
she said she would go
shopping instead of race
Robbie Brightwell
Deep-thinking athlete who with Ann Packer formed one half of Britain’s ‘golden couple’ at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964
CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESEmail: [email protected]Evgeny Maslin
Russian general known for his bonhomie and for dismantling huge stockpiles of nuclear warheads, including those in Ukraine
In a world fearing a new era of Russian
nuclear threat, it seems timely to re-
member Evgeny Maslin. A few decades
ago this Russian general made a huge
contribution to reducing the danger of
nuclear weapons.
General Maslin was from 1992 to 1997
the head of the Russian defence minis-
try’s department responsible for nu-
clear weapons safety. It fell to him to
secure the estimated 25,000 nuclear
weapons left on the territories of the
Soviet Union after its collapse.
It was a daunting and sensitive task.
There were political tensions between
the Russian Federation and the newly
independent states around it where
weapons were located including
Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The weapons
themselves were often in a hazardous
state, stored and transported in poor
conditions and managed and guarded
by 30,000 largely demoralised staff.
There was also the constant threat of
the criminal appropriation of nuclear
weapons by one of the rogue groups
that sprang up in the chaotic aftermath
of the end of Soviet rule.
As the US defence secretary Dick
Cheney pointed out, even if 99 per cent
of the Soviet nuclear weapons were
successfully rounded up, that would
still have left 250 weapons bigger than
the Hiroshima bomb on the loose.
Part of Maslin’s challenge was to per-
suade Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakh-
stan to hand over or destroy the nuclear
weapons they had inherited from the
Soviet state. He urged Russian disar-
mament too, helping secure agree-
ments with the US whereby at one
stage 2,000 warheads a year were being
destroyed.
Maslin worked out what he needed
and appealed for international help, es-
pecially to the US. He persuaded doubt-
ers in the Russian government that “we
need it for our own security, not to
please Americans”. The coun-
tries of the former USSR, he
pointed out, lacked spe-
cialist transport and
storage containers
for fissile materials,
and damage con-
trol equipment for
any nuclear acci-
dents. Poor pay and
living conditions
for military special-
ists and civilian per-
sonnel supposedly
looking after the weap-
ons were also a continuing
problem, he argued.
His assessments and appeals were
persuasive. Maslin developed especially
close collaboration with US politicians
and officials through the so-called
Nunn-Lugar programme, initiated by
two US senators. Finance and specialist
technical assistance and equipment
were provided to help implement Mas-
lin’s plans, including bullet-proof blan-
kets for transporting weapons, and
high-security fencing for safer storage.It was all, Maslin believed, a vital part
of post-Cold War confidence-building.
Such co-operation, as well as help from
other countries including the UK,
“strengthens security and transparency
in the disarmament effort,” he said.
“The whole world also benefits from
greater confidence in the future and ex-
panded co-operation in other fields.”
His success in negotiating such sensi-
tive deals was helped by his abil-
ity to bond with his inter-
national colleagues.
“Distrust, strained
relations, and suspi-
cions have van-
ished,” he stated in
the mid-1990s.
“The negotiations
have been conduct-
ed in an atmos-
phere of goodwill.”
Known for his bon-
homie, he enhanced
that mood of goodwill by
conversing with his inter-
national colleagues about his
love of chess, art and literature (Kipling
was a favourite) or indulging his love of
wine and cognac. He also regularly
broke into song, including ballads about
the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi
Germany.
He liked to see the Russian-US co-
operation on the safety of nuclear
weapons in the 1990s as comparable to
the military and economic co-opera-
tion between Moscow and Washingtonduring the Second World War. In the
end Maslin’s ambitions were trium-
phantly fulfilled. Despite the chaotic
political and economic conditions in
much of the former Soviet Union not a
single nuclear warhead was lost, in-
volved in an accident or stolen. For a
while at least, the success of his inter-
national project seemed proof of a new
era in constructive co-operation after
the decades of Cold War rivalry.
Maslin had been born into a very
different era in Stalin’s Soviet Union in
1937 in a village in the Tambov region
about 250 miles from Moscow. He was
raised in the nearby town of Algasovo
where his parents were teachers. After
surviving the Second World War years
at school he joined a military academy
in Leningrad in the 1950s. His father,
who had fought with the Red Army in
the war, discouraged him from joining
the infantry so he trained as an engi-
neer and was then sent to the Soviet de-
fence ministry’s specialist nuclear
weapons security unit. He rose steadily
to become its boss in the extraordinary
circumstances of 1992, just after the
USSR had ceased to exist.
He was married to Nina, who worked
in a military hospital. They had two
daughters, Ekaterina, who works for a
pharmaceutical company, and Elena, a
teacher.
After retiring from his military post
in 1997 Maslin’s expertise was still much
in demand as an adviser on questions of
disarmament and non-proliferation aswell as nuclear weapons security. He
was also a member of the Global Zero
Commission, devoted to pressing for an
end to nuclear arms.
“If we think of the world in terms of
the whole planet, then it is high time for
humankind to stop threatening each
other with nuclear weapons as well and
start dealing with universal problems,”
he commented in 2017. “However, in
the current situation the world would
not be any safer, this is my deepest con-
viction.” The need was to manage the
weapons the world still had as well as
promote mutual understanding and
good crisis management to try to pre-
vent their use.
Those warnings now seem especially
prescient as President Putin wages war
on Ukraine and hints at a nuclear
threat against those who stand in his
way. Maslin represented a very differ-
ent strand in Russian military and gov-
ernmental thinking as the Cold War
ended. With the death of General Mas-
lin, said one tribute, “it seems the era of
co-operative security has come to an
end 30 years after it started. But the
memory of the singing nuclear general
who guarded our peace will remain as a
guiding light for future generations.”Evgeny Maslin, nuclear weapons expert,
was born on May 20, 1937. He died of
cancer on February 26, 2022, aged 84SSR, he
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