Tamara Press

Tamara Natanovna Press, born on 10 May 1937 in Kharkov, was a Soviet athlete who dominated the shot put and discus throw in the early 1960s. She won three gold medals and one silver medal at the 1960 and 1964 Olympics and three European titles between 1958 and 1962. Between 1959 and 1965 she set eleven world records, five in the shot put and six in the discus, and she held sixteen national titles. Her father died fighting in the Second World War in 1942 and her mother took the family to Samarkand, where Tamara and her younger sister Irina, also a prominent track athlete, began training; in 1955 she moved to Leningrad to train under the coach Viktor Alekseyev. She retired in 1966, worked as an athletics coach and official in Moscow, wrote several books on sport and defended a doctorate in pedagogy in 1974. She died on 26 April 2021.