Tatyana Kazankina

Tatyana Vasilyevna Kazankina, born on 17 December 1951 in Petrovsk, is a Russian former runner who set seven world records and won three gold medals at the Olympic Games for the Soviet Union, and she competed for the club VSS Burevestnik. A month before the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal she became the first woman to run 1500 metres in under four minutes, with 3:56.0, and she won both the 1500 metres and the 800 metres at those Games, setting a world record in the 800 metres. In 1980 she ran the 1500 metres in 3:52.47, the first woman to run the distance faster than Paavo Nurmi, a time that stood as a world record for thirteen years. Her career ended in September 1984 when she was suspended for eighteen months for refusing a drugs test. She graduated in economics from Leningrad State University in 1975, later earned a degree in pedagogical science and wrote more than twenty scientific works.