Once she could traverse the earth like a skimming stone, now her power to glide is just a memory, and even walking is difficult.
"My eyes are starting to get really bad," she says.
"They're fighting against one another for dominance."
Pam Ryan, 84, lives with her curious dog, Ruby, in a flat behind her daughter Kim's house in Montmorency, a suburb of Melbourne.
From her welcome mat she can see the broad outline of a garden in need of a trim and a driveway too steep to walk, hard to stomach for a lifetime tamer of hills and gardens.
"I'm at the end of my tether," she says.
Ryan used to be a world record holder. She was also an inspiring coach until a few years ago, when various cancers and an auto-immune disease conspired.
"I don't know of any part of my body it hasn't attacked," she says.
Yet, she is still making a contribution to young people's lives.
"I felt I've got to do something with my brain," she says.
"So I bought myself a new knitting machine."
One of her regular taxi drivers heard about this new Singer machine and asked if Ryan would mind knitting his new baby something warm to wear.
She made him a cardigan. It motivated her.
"I've been producing hundreds and hundreds of baby cardigans and they go to the children's hospital or somewhere. I just pass them on," she says.
This is all to say that Ryan, one of Australia's greatest athletes and one of the nation's unluckiest Hall of Fame Olympians, still doesn't give in to setbacks.
"You can't stop," she says with a fortitude typical of her glorious generation.
From Cohuna to the Olympic trials
She was born Pam Kilborn in August 1939, three weeks before Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Her parents, Grace and Rod, moved the family from Cohuna to Melbourne so Mr Kilborn could enlist. He ended up working in Army Inspection preparing equipment for overseas forces.
After the war, the Kilborn family moved back to the bush, this time to Yarrawonga, and it was here Pam entered her first children's race at the Church of England picnic.
Coins were scattered on the ground at the finish line as the winner's reward. Kilborn beat the field and made a "fair bit of money in thruppences".
Her next races were back in Melbourne during her school years.
The Kilborns rented a house in Rushall Crescent, Clifton Hill. Pam's brothers, Jim and Phillip, went to Caulfield Technical school and Pam attended Fitzroy Central School before being accepted by University High.
She played hockey for Uni High and joined the girls' athletics team, excelling in sprints, hurdles, long jump, and pentathlon.
"My mum and dad were great. They used to drive me to training, drive me home, and watch all my events," she says.
The 1956 Melbourne Olympics inspired everyone in sport.
"All my schoolmates wagged school and went to the Games," she recalls.
"We met a Malaysian hockey player who walked us through the gates."
She somehow got a ticket to watch her idol, Shirley Strickland, run in the heats of the 80m hurdles.
"I spent lots of time visiting the village in Heidelberg and collected autographs," she says.
"I remember a fellow from Iceland who placed third in the triple jump (Vihjakmur Einarsson, who actually finished second). I wish I still had my autograph book."
With spring in her heels, Pam Kilborn was soon competing against her heroes.
Her first national championships were 1958.
Over the next 14 years she would win 17 individual national titles, set records in nine events, and be crowned by the press "successor to Betty Cuthbert as the Golden Girl of Australian athletics".
In Hobart, 1960, she finished third in her favourite event — the 80m hurdles — at the Australian Championships behind Norma Thrower and Gloria Cooke. Strickland — the 1952 and 1956 Olympic champion — finished fifth.
The Australian athletics team for the Rome Olympics included eight women and 23 men. There was some discussion, apparently, about sending Kilborn to the Games but it did not eventuate.
Two years later, at 23, she scaled the podium at the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth, winning the 80m hurdles and long jump.
She told leading ABC commentator Norman May: "It was the first big competition that I'd really ever had. And I was quite surprised when I won quite so easily."
Her decade-long Australian hurdling reign had begun, and her desire to win an Olympic gold medal became eternal.
Too close to call at Tokyo 1964
Her coach was German immigrant Henri Schubert, who would later join Kilborn in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
Schubert "never charged a penny".
"He was a fantastic coach," she says.
"He didn't conform (to conventional methods). It was six days a week training. I trained hard."
Like other Australian champions, she built her career on the hills.
"I know the ones around the (Sidney) Myer Music Bowl really well," she recalls.
"The long ones, the short ones, the one in between. He'd have you going non-stop."
Even in those days, Kilborn had health concerns.
"I was born with a deformed kidney, which didn't help when I got into training really hard. And I got, very early on, a liver complaint. That really stirred me up," she says.
"I had all these things wrong with me that didn't help my running but it made me strong. I think that's why I have survived longer than I probably would've."
In 1963, Kilborn became the first woman to win three Australian titles in one year: 80m hurdles, long jump and pentathlon.
By now, she was a world class hurdler and budding Olympian.
Approaching the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Schubert predicted his charge would win the title in world record time.
"Whoever wins will have to do 10.4 (seconds)," he said.
"And Pam can do it. She has done 10.6 about 15 times and 10.5 four or five times."
Kilborn blew through her first Olympic heat into the semi final and broke the Games record of 10.6 seconds.
In the final, Kilborn was against the Soviet Union's 1960 Olympic champion Irina Press, Germany's Karin Balzer, Japan's home crowd favourite Yoda Ikuko, and Poland's Teresa Cieply.
Colour film of the race shows one of the closest in Olympic history.
In slow motion, you can see a field straining at record speed, the Russian Press gulping air as she clears each hurdle, the elegant Ikuko starting fastest in lane six, right beside the Aussie Kilborn, with a white headband and slightly hunched shoulders, winning right up until the end.
If you pause the race at 78m, Kilborn looks to be in front. Two metres later, she hits the line alongside Balzer and Ciepley. Splitting them appears impossible.
"I knew I had a chance," she recalls 60 years later.
"We were taken into a room where we sat with one another and about 40 minutes later they came in with the results."
The judges awarded Balzer the gold, Ciepley the silver, and Kilborn the bronze, two one hundredths of a second away from being an Olympic champion.
"It was only an inch," she says.
"I wasn't going to lose it next time."
The bronze medal in Tokyo preceded the best athletic years of Kilborn's life.
She broke the world record in Osaka, Japan, after the Games, and for three years thereafter she was unbeatable.
In 1968, approaching the next Olympic Games in Mexico City, no one in the world seemed capable of preventing Pam Kilborn winning gold.
Although — there was one girl in New South Wales.
Meet the Caird family: A girl with world class speed
In 1956, when Betty Cuthbert and Shirley Strickland were becoming the tracks stars of the world in Melbourne and a teenage Pam Kilborn was chasing autographs with stars in her eyes, a five-year-old girl, Maureen Caird, was running and jumping in a park in Seven Hills, western Sydney, with her enthusiastic father Rob.
Rob Caird, a factory foreman who cleaned the local pub on Sunday mornings, loved athletics.
"Dad was from Melbourne," Maureen, 72, tells ABC Sport in her first interview for decades.
"He was mad on all sports, athletics mainly. So he was training me on an oval down the road as soon as I could move."
According to the book Aussie Gold by Reet and Max Howell, Maureen's mother, Ethel, saw how much running her daughter was doing and said to her husband, "why don't you buy a race dog and run its legs off."
But Caird enjoyed it. Running was easy, rhythmic.
"I think you're just born with it," she says.
"Right from the beginning (of school), they line you all up, right? They line the boys up and girls up, and I beat the boys. All you do is run as fast as you can. I was a long way ahead."
Her older sister, Carole, excelled at ballet and ballroom dancing.
"We're kind of opposites in some ways," she says.
She's talking more about personality than pastimes.
"In some ways I'm a loner. My sister is easier going, and I'm not," she says.
Young Caird followed her father's passions; she played basketball, softball and cricket at Meadows Primary School.
"I know my sports mistress at primary school, she wanted me to do tennis. But you still had to pay for a coach even back then. I couldn't afford it. Whereas athletics is free," she says.
Age nine, Caird was school champion in the 75-yard sprint and long jump.
In 1964, when Kilborn was winning her Olympic bronze medal in Tokyo, Caird was crowned 100 yards winner at the NSW Primary Schools Championships.
She was also running with a squad trained by June Ferguson, coach of Cuthbert, in Epping.
Ferguson coached Caird to be lightning off the blocks.
And like Kilborn, Caird benefited from her parents' dedication.
Mr Caird was in charge of transport. After work he drove his youngest daughter to training and back, a 90 minute hike. On weekends he took her to the city for inter-club competition.
Father and daughter would also spend countless hours in his second hand car travelling to big meets.
Ethel Caird was the family spokesperson.
"She did the interviews," Caird recalls of her mother.
"She was good at that, she was very talented that way. All I had to do was turn up and run."
Mrs Caird also kept records of her daughter's races: newspaper clippings, pictures, information about opponents.
Maureen wasn't all that interested in those details.
"I don't think I had competitiveness," she explains.
"I think I was just determined to do as good as I can. I never took much notice of who I was racing against."
In fact, Caird was just as content playing her guitar or riding her beloved Bubbles, a pony she had agisted on a one acre property not far from her home.
"I used to jump on her and ride around, all the back streets," she says.
"Just free, on my own, and it was fantastic. They were my happiest days."
She rode bareback, waiting for her father to save enough money for a saddle.
"After six months, I finally got one," she says.
"An old stock saddle, and off I went. You couldn't do things like that these days."
Caird runs world class times as a junior: A 'special' athlete becomes an Olympic contender
People told Caird she was going to win an Olympic gold medal.
"I used to get that when I was in primary school and used to just laugh at them," she says.
"I only thought about what was ahead of me."
In 1965, Caird began knocking off national junior records in the 80m hurdles.
The peerless Pam Kilborn had recently lowered the world record to 10.4 seconds.
Caird's personal best was 10.8, although it was wind assisted. She was regularly running 11 seconds as a 14-year-old.
At the 1966 NSW State Championships, Caird won four sub-junior (14yo) titles: 100yd, 150yd, long jump, and 80m hurdles. She also won the 80m hurdles at the under 18 nationals.
Her father pushed for her to be picked in the Australian team for the 1966 British and Empire Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica, but team selectors said she was too young.
"That broke my father's heart," she says.
"He was disgusted with it."
Kilborn won the Commonwealth gold medal in 10.9 seconds; Caird's best would have been good enough for a medal.
"I haven't forgotten that one, I can tell you," she says.
At the beginning of 1968, Caird was a standout at the junior championships, winning the 80m hurdles in 10.6 seconds and getting second in the 100m sprint to another amazing 16-year-old, Raelene Boyle.
The same week, at the same venue, Caird was allowed to run in the senior hurdling championships. Pam Kilborn won (10.5); Maureen Caird was second (10.6).
Barring injury, the two Australians would next compete against each other in the Olympic final in Mexico City 222 days later.
Caird knew of few people in Australian athletics who reckoned she could beat Kilborn.
Her coach June Ferguson said publicly: "Young Maureen is so close behind Pam Kilborn, anything could happen in Mexico. She has tremendous determination, good competitive spirit and the killer instinct."
And 200m runner Peter Norman was also a believer.
"He was the only guy, the only competitor over there (in Mexico), who told me I would win," Caird says.
Caird, still only 16 when she flew to Mexico, felt she had little in common with her Australian teammates, so Norman's support was invaluable.
"Good old Peter. He just made you feel comfortable and it didn't matter that I was only 16, 17, I still felt comfortable around him. Peter was special," she says.
Most others thought the gold would go to Kilborn, who could not abide offerings of good luck.
"People wish you good luck — there's no luck in it. It's all hard work," she says.
"It was my Games. I knew I had the (gold) medal. It wasn't going to go to anybody else."
The showdown: Drama and pain in preparation for the Olympic final
In her final, harried training session in Melbourne before heading to Mexico, Kilborn tripped over a hurdle and fell hard onto the track.
"Some dads helped set the hurdles and I didn't have time to check them," she recalls.
"The third or fourth last hurdle was a metre too close and I caught it with my lead leg under the wooden bar. I landed on the cinders and slid to the next hurdle which hit me in the ribs. I had no skin on my face, anywhere down my stomach and knees, and I was a mess."
A doctor cleaned her wounds with a scrubbing brush.
"I went home, picked up my bag and flew to the Games," she says.
She fell again in Mexico City, with Australian press reporting: "Pam Kilborn will compete in pain if she runs in the Olympic Games next week. The 29-year-old Melbourne tore a muscle in her shoulder … and has been receiving daily injections."
Dr Brian Corrigan said Kilborn would have strife accelerating.
"She can run well enough but the trouble comes when she has to use her arms excessively," he said.
Kilborn never thought about quitting.
"I didn't come here for a holiday," she told reporters.
"I came here to run, so of course, I'll run. My shoulder only really hurts when I start, so I'll leave off practicing starts for a few days."
Maureen Caird's adversity in Mexico was an emotional burden. Her father, who was her reason for racing at age five and still her motivating influence twelve years later, had a brain tumour.
"I remember him coming out to the airport to see me off and he was struggling then — to recognise me even," she says.
"And then when I was away in Mexico, mum was saying I don't think dad … he's not good."
Practice races were staged against Europe's best hurdlers, including eyebrow-raising Russian Vera Korsakova, who had set a new world record of 10.2 seconds in Latvia in June.
Caird beat Korsakova in their first warm-up race, while Kilborn rested.
Ferguson had instructed Caird to remain disciplined.
"She just told me to follow my schedule. I trained twice a day. It was tough because it was humid over there," she says.
History was stacked against the youngster.
Only two other track and field athletes — Bob Mathias in the 1948 decathlon, and Mihaela Penes in the 1964 javelin — had worn gold medals around their necks as 17-years-olds.
Thirteen days before the Games, Caird turned 17, celebrating her birthday by winning another warm-up event.
Kilborn missed that race, too. She was still resting, waiting for the race of her life.
Since 1896, Australia has won 185 gold medals in 30 Olympic Games.
Only 22 gold medals have been won by Australians in track and field, one third of those by Australian women in 1952 and 1956.
During this era, Aussies celebrated first-and-third podium finishes several times: 1952 Marjorie Jackson-Shirley Strickland; 1956 Betty Cuthbert–Marlene Matthews; Strickland-Norma Thrower.
Never had Australia gone one-two in an Olympic athletics final.
It would only happen once, in Mexico City, October 18, 1968.
Ten seconds to change their lives: Australia's one-two, then the rest of the world
It was pelting rain.
Caird was in lane one for the final.
"I just said (to myself) concentrate on the warm up the way I would normally warm up," she says.
She had spent the morning at the hairdressers, a public display of confidence, and now her hair was pointing at the sky like Olympic torch flame under a gold band.
"You've got to look good if you're gonna be a winner," she says.
"That's what they do these days, I was just ahead of time, don't you reckon?"
Some of the pins set to hold her hair in place were falling out; she left them lying in puddles on the new age tartan track.
Now her concentration was on her start. Only the start. She thought, I'm right if I get out.
"Nobody could beat me out of the blocks, I knew that," she says.
"I only think of the start and first hurdle. You've gotta get there before anybody else."
Kilborn was all the way out in lane eight; all her opponents were on her left side.
The favourite gave them a glance but nothing more. Her mind had to be on the starter's gun and the eight hurdles ahead of her.
It was possible some of the athletes from other nations could have a blinder and cause an upset, although it would be a surprise.
The form of the Australians was hot.
Both of them went through their heats in Olympic record time: 10.4 seconds. Kilborn again ran 10.4 in the semis; Caird won her semi in 10.5.
The German 1964 Olympic champion, Karin Balzer (now running for East Germany), made the final in a non-threatening semi final time, just in front of world record holder Korsakova, who didn't even make it past the semis.
They crouched into the blocks.
Caird craned to see the first hurdle one last time before bowing her head in anticipation.
She leaned over the line, peering as far as she could beyond it, her body weight forward.
The slightest moment before the start, the teenager straightened her back and lowered her hips, a crouch within a crouch.
Then the raincoat-wearing starter pointed his pistol at the ground, squeezed his hand, and fired.
In studying an old film of the race, you can see Caird's reaction time is faster than her competitors. She appears to execute the perfect start at the perfect time.
"It's just a reflex thing," she says 56 years later.
Eight strides into the race, the teen was leading so impressively her right leg was feeling for the ground on the other side of the first hurdle before middle lane runners had taken their first leap.
Taiwan's Chi Cheng also aced the start and led the chasing pack from lanes two to seven, but she could never hope to catch Caird, who was clearing hurdles in the thin air of Mexico as freely as she rode Bubbles through the streets of western Sydney.
Only rain drops threatened the impeccable rhythm of Caird's still posture and faintly bobbing head.
"I didn't see one of the hurdles, some rain splashed in my eye," she told a reporter later.
"But I knew the hurdle had to be somewhere there so I jumped and it was alright."
While Caird gave control of the race to her senses, Kilborn was gathering all her strength in the outside lane.
The veteran's start looked slow compared to the teenager's but it wasn't ruinous, and by the second and third hurdles she was making ground, drawing level with Chi Cheng in lane two.
Over the next hurdles, the field began taking a shallow U-shape, the two Aussies reaching for the finish as the highest points of the consonant.
Asked to describe what it was like to be at full speed in an Olympic final, Kilborn talks as if she were once again going over the hurdles, one by one.
"Skill … power of being able to do something really well… an inner feeling that you've worked at getting the least possible time in the air … the fastest time possible time down on the ground again," she says.
"And three steps to gain as much power and speed as you can for the next … it's something I achieved that I thought I could.
"It was good, hurdling. I so regret I can't do it now."
You can see it all there when you look back at the final in Mexico … hurdles four, five, six … Kilborn leading with her left leg, bounding, closing.
But not quickly enough.
Caird had not only started well, she was holding well.
When the pace of Kilborn finally exceeded the pace of the youngster, taking her within the wisp of a thought of victory, the race was ending.
Kilborn, with all she was born with and all she had learned, threw both her arms back to meet the line with her chest.
Her time was 10.46 seconds. She had run brilliantly. But she did not win.
"The gold medal's the only thing that counts," she says.
"Nobody wants second place."
At this moment a photographer inside the track took a snap of Caird, almost smiling, becoming the youngest Olympic track champion ever.
She had run a personal best 10.39 seconds.
"Away I went," she says.
"Beat the lot of them."
Kilborn clenched her fists in self admonishment.
"In 80m, you can't get there," she says.
"I got within a foot but I couldn't make it the last little bit."
She drifts into deeper thought as she remembers it all.
"It's just … you want so much," she says.
She recalls walking away.
"I was cursing myself," she says.
"I'd hoped for something better. And Ray Weinberg (Australian athletics team coach) said 'do you want the good news or the bad news?'. And I said, 'it's all bad news'."
But Weinberg had worse news; an administrator failed to put Kilborn on the Australian team list for the 4x100m relay.
"We ran a week before (the Games) and we broke the world record. We had every chance of a medal," she says.
In her sprinting prime, Pam Kilborn was left on the sidelines to watch her fellow Aussies Jennifer Boyle, Jennifer Lamy, Joyce Bennett, and Dianne Burge finish fifth in the final.
The cost and value of Olympic medals: And one more shot in Munich
Kilborn couldn't say whether she had another Olympic Games in her.
She turned 30 and went back to training six days a week because she still enjoyed it. Professionally, she was teaching, earning the money she needed to keep going in athletics.
In 1970, Kilborn ran in her third British Commonwealth Games, this time in Edinburgh.
"They were friendly games, really. I enjoyed them," she says.
She became the first woman to win the same event, albeit the 80m hurdles had become the 100m hurdles, in three consecutive Games. Maureen Caird won the silver medal.
Kilborn still chuckles at her memory of carrying the flag for Australia during the closing ceremony in front of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, while wearing a mini skirt.
"The bit above the knee seemed to be crimping higher and higher," she says.
"I put my hands up with the flag, and my mini dress went up so high I thought everybody's going to see what's underneath.
"And the crowd went absolutely crazy. There was cheering and goodness knows what. I thought, oh no, I'll never let this down."
Six months later, Kilborn revealed her plans to marry fiance Darren Ryan and give up running after one last race in Melbourne.
The "softly-spoken super woman" would draw a huge crowd, the press reported.
"I have reached the pinnacle of athletics, and suffered the pitfalls," Kilbron said.
"But my remaining ambition is to have a family and be a good housewife.
"I have given my all to athletics and now, as I'm getting older and more sensible, I want those things that I have been missing."
Retirement didn't stick.
Kilborn returned as Kilborn-Ryan for the 1972 Australian Championships, where she was second to Penny Gilles in 100m hurdles, ahead of Maureen Caird.
All three women qualified for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
On 28 June 1972, in Warsaw, Kilborn-Ryan went as fast over the hurdles as she would ever go, running the 100m in 12.93 seconds, equalling the world record.
It was an Australian record that would stand for 35 years.
It seemed possible that she could win an Olympic Gold medal after all.
Caird tries to prove the doubters wrong again
Caird's path from Mexico to Munich was vastly different.
When she returned to Australia from Mexico City for a parade and civic reception, she found her father gravely ill.
"He hardly recognised me," she says.
"He'd had an operation but it wasn't successful. (He was sick) all that time, it was cruel. Cruel to watch something like that."
Mr Caird never got to enjoy his daughter's Olympic title. He had inspired it, and now he could not share it with her.
"You think, oh God, we struggled right up till that point (the gold medal), and he didn't really get the chance to take it all in," she says.
With her father struggling, Caird's motivation for running came and went, as did her form in big races.
"I only did it for them (her parents)," she says.
"I think most kids are the same. Otherwise you probably wouldn't bother. Doing it for dad.There were a lot of other sports I would've liked to try. But I didn't have the money. You had to have money for golf, you had to have money for tennis."
Her financial struggles continued despite her Olympic champion status. She took work where she could find it, including casual shifts at K-Mart.
She was often invited to events she could not afford to attend.
"I did the Melbourne Cup and went to all the functions," she says.
"I didn't mind it, a little bit of that was OK. It got worse when I would be expected to go to things and I didn't have the money."
On her best day she could still be the fastest hurdler in the world.
The 1970 Australian Championships were held in Melbourne and relatives on her father's side of the family were there to watch.
An invigorated Caird went like a bullet, beating Pam Kilborn in the 100m hurdles for the first time at the national titles.
Then Caird doubled up and won the 200m hurdles.
"Maybe they'll believe now that it wasn't a fluke in Mexico," she told the press.
It meant the world to Caird to be supported by her paternal kin.
"That was a really good day," she says 54 years later.
"Actually that was a happier day than anything."
But her elation abated.
The British and Commonwealth Games were held in Edinburgh months later.
She seemed miserable on the podium.
After the Games, Caird did not come home with the Australian team, rather she travelled to America.
In New York she learned her father was on his deathbed. She flew home within days and made it to the funeral.
"It's ugly isn't it," she says.
"It's sad really to think back like that. He was only young. He would've been about 46 (when he died).
"I feel sorry for my mum. It must've been so hard for her looking after him like that. She didn't have the best of health as well."
Not long before flying to Europe to compete for Australia in the Munich Olympics, Caird met the love of her life at a nightspot in Rose Bay.
He was Ross Jones, a New Zealander.
"He didn't know I'd won a gold medal when I met him," Caird says.
"I just knew. You just do don't you? He was probably the opposite of what I'd ever look for. And I was like, that's the one. Nothing to do with athletics. Liked me for me. No regrets."
Weeks later, Caird decided she would get married.
"Mareen said she was off to Munich and 'I think we should get married before I go.' Very matter of fact," Jones says.
"That's Maureen, she's very pragmatic. She doesn't really follow the normal protocols of etiquettes of life. She's what you see is what you get."
That was a Wednesday. Friday night they got hitched at a registry office in Sydney.
"That only cost us $15," she recalls.
"We didn't have any money."
There was no honeymoon.
Ross Jones went back to working night shifts at a packaging place in South Sydney, while his new wife went to the run on her second Olympics.
Munich — a disastrous and deadly Games
The sports world changed between 1968 and 1972.
Some athletes had been using performance enhancing drugs for many years, but there had been nothing as brazen as the anabolic steroid use now being state-sanctioned by East Germany.
Pam Kilborn-Ryan knew she would have to run another personal best to get anywhere near the podium in Munich.
"(Drugs) were everywhere," she says.
"Europe was full of it."
Drug testing was a relatively new measure, not sophisticated enough to trace steroids. The International Olympic Committee didn't even have a list of banned substances in its rules.
For athletes willing to get an unfair advantage over the competition, it was open season.
Maureen Caird tried to forget about the absurdity of it.
"I suppose it was there but there wasn't much they could do about it," she says.
"Particularly the European countries, because they don't care about (cheating), as long as they win the medals.
"You've just gotta be special to beat them, put it that way. They're good athletes but they're not great athletes, or they wouldn't need to take anything."
Caird had bigger problems in Munich. A mysterious stomach pain she had back in Australia would not go away.
"I didn't know what it was. Something was not right," she says.
She didn't train before her first race, and she wanted to go home as soon as possible.
"I ran a heat of the hurdles and got fifth and said, thank God I got fifth," she says.
"So that was a wipeout, those Games."
Penny Gilles also failed to qualify for the semis.
Kilborn-Ryan ran brilliantly in her heat, equalling her Australian record. She finished second to East Germany's Annelie Ehrhardt, who set an OIympic record of 12.70 seconds.
A day later the Munich Games became the scene of a terrorist attack.
Eight members of a Palestinian militant group took control of a section of the athletes' village, killing two members of the Israeli team and taking nine others hostage.
Pam Kilborn-Ryan was friends with the Israeli hurdler Esther Shahamorov, whose coach Amizur Shapira was among the hostages.
She recalls how the terrorists jumped the fence "right behind our quarters" and took the Israeli quarters by force.
"So there was no getting away from that," she says.
West German authorities arranged for the terrorists and hostages to be flown from the Olympic village to a nearby NATO airbase.
"We watched the blackest of helicopters flying down amongst everything," she says.
"And they got them to the airport. Somebody decided they can't leave."
A failed rescue attempt resulted in the death of all hostages. Shapira was one of them.
A memorial ceremony was held for 80,000 spectators and Olympic athletes, but Kilborn-Ryan was told "men can attend but girls are not allowed".
Competition resumed and Kilborn-Ryan ran the final of the 100m hurdles against three women from East Germany, three from Poland, and one from Romania.
Annelie Ehrhardt set a new world record (12.59) to win gold.
Kilborn-Ryan got fourth place.
"I vividly remember coming second to the German (Ehrhardt) about a hurdle and half before the finish," she says.
"I was close to second anyway.
"I thought, I don't know how to run this last bit. My legs just would not take me the last bit of the hurdles. And the other two got in front of me, not by much, but they got in front of me."
Regrets pile up as she looks back at her Olympic career from 1960 to 1972.
"I just didn't achieve what I wanted," she says.
"You look back and say if I'd run in Rome (1960) I would've won in Tokyo. I would've had the experience of running, even though I wouldn't have won (in Rome). I didn't know what Tokyo was about. I went there like a normal country kid who knew nothing and ran in the Olympics Games. If I'd won that one, maybe the next one would've been better.
"There's an awful lot of ifs in life."
East German women won Olympic gold at Munich in the 100m, 200m, 400m, and 100m hurdles.
Australia's Raelene Boyle won silver in the 100m and 200m; she has always felt unfairly beaten.
When Boyle was given a merit award by the Australian Olympic Committee in 2019, she took the opportunity to call on the IOC to investigate historic doping.
"There's a lot of people out there who really deserved medals they didn't get and we have a lot in this country. Forget me, it's not me I'm talking for," she said.
Nothing happened.
After Munich, there would be no more Games
At 21, Maureen Caird came back to Australia to announce she was married and her name was Maureen Jones.
She quit athletics, never to return.
Her stomach pain continued.
Eventually, she found out it was due to a peptic ulcer.
"I lived with that pain for about ten years. They've got an antibiotic for it now," she says.
Maureen and Ross Jones moved to Nelson, New Zealand, to work in the family logging business.
They tried to have children but Maureen had an ectopic pregnancy.
Three years later she had another ectopic pregnancy.
"So that's why I never had kids. That's just the way it goes." she says.
In 1986, she flew back to Australia to be inducted into the national sporting Hall of Fame.
"I sat right next to Peter Norman," she recalls.
"Oh Christ, he was funny. And he never forgot me, and I never forgot him."
Norman, a 200m silver medallist in Mexico City, reached broader acclaim for standing on the podium in solidarity with Tommie Smith and John Carlos when the Americans raised their fists as a human rights protest.
Much later the Australian Olympic Committee would belatedly award Norman a posthumous Order of Merit.
After her brief moment in the Hall of Fame spotlight, Maureen once again became a stranger to organised sport.
"She's her own person," her husband says.
"She genuinely doesn't like attention. She's inwardly proud of what she's done but outwardly you would never ever see it."
The champion resumed riding horses for enjoyment and has barely stopped.
"I like to school a horse," she says.
"I do like a well mannered horse. And I don't like pushing the horses hard. I do it for relaxation, but you do have to train the horse so you've got a comfortable ride and a safe ride."
In the late 1990s, Maureen and Ross relocated back to Australia, settling on a five-acre property in Coffs Harbour to be closer to Maureen's ailing mother, who lived in Brunswick Heads.
They watched the 2000 Sydney Olympics from home, unable to pay the cost of travelling to the Games and staying in Sydney.
"The committee that was organising it called her up and asked her to come to the Games and wear your uniform and fly the flag," Ross says.
"They weren't going to meet any of the costs … and that was the end of that. I was rather disappointed because this was (her) hometown Olympics. She was a hometown hero."
One of the highlights of the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony was the celebration and presence of some of Australia's best female track athletes, including Betty Cuthbert, Shirley Strickland, and Raelene Boyle.
Maureen thought she deserved to be invited to at least watch the opening ceremony from inside the stadium.
"I wouldn't have done it anyway but I would've liked to have been asked," she says.
"She's definitely an individual," her husband says.
"She's so unconventional. For years, we couldn't remember when our anniversary was. We didn't commemorate birthdays. We didn't commemorate our golden wedding. We just get on with life and that's the way she is. She doesn't like ceremony, and I'm not that fussed about it either."
Nevertheless, Maureen was pleased to be awarded a prestigious Australian Sports Medal in 2000.
These days, Ross teaches engineering at TAFE and Maureen takes care of their property, riding her horse Toby three times a week.
"I've gotta get on a stool to get on him," she says.
"I don't have the spring anymore I'm afraid. It's gone."
Thoughts of Mexico are rare.
"I can still watch it now, it's always on Google," she says.
"But not very often. It's just another time. I'm always thinking about what I'll do next with the horse. Just like I was with athletics."
Consequences of not winning that gold medal
Recollections of Olympic finals are more complicated for Pam Ryan.
What does an athlete who maintained national dominance and international excellence for an entire decade think about those hundredths of seconds between Olympic gold, silver and bronze?
"I suppose I don't," she says.
"I did have a great career. It could've been greater."
After retiring from competition in 1972, she continued to teach at Sunvale Primary School, in suburban Sunshine, where the students had always barracked for her.
"(When) the Commonwealth Games in Perth came along," she recalls.
"Staff and parents with the kids booked buses and on my arrival in Melbourne I was greeted by the whole school at the old Essendon airport. What could be better than that as a memory?"
She began coaching sprinters and hurdlers, and went on mentoring young athletes for nearly five decades.
"I took up coaching because my coach coached me throughout my whole career and did that for nothing," she says.
"I had to give back."
One of her talented athletes from 2009 to 2016, Stella McNamara, says Ryan was always supportive.
"Run hard was a favourite of hers, never a 'good luck'," she says.
"She had an unwavering belief in her athletes. She always met my intense self-doubt with positive words and encouragement, but never got angry if you underperformed, just helped pick you up for next time. She was the kind of coach that made you want to do better, just for all her hard work.
"She was and still is so much more than a coach to me and all who trained under her. She coached whole families of kids from when they were little to adults and collected a throng of athletes who all loved her. She really is wonderful."
Pam Ryan met her goal from 1970 of having a big family.
She had one daughter, Kim, two sons, Andrew and Brett, and nine grandchildren.
Her husband, Darren, died in 2011, age 72, after 40 years of marriage.
Unlike Maureen, Pam went to the Sydney Olympics and enjoyed every minute.
"They took me up there and put me up in a hotel," she says.
"I attended all functions with other international guests. I had the best seats when I wanted."
She was made an honorary life member of Athletics Australia in 2017.
In 2022, when the Commonwealth Games baton was passing through Melbourne, she felt honoured to take part in an event at Lakeside Stadium.
The organisers' idea was for some other people to run the torch around the track and pass it to her; the three-time Olympian was meant to salute the crowd with a wave.
She did everything as planned before surprising all present.
She turned and shuffled toward the finish line as if she were running another race, half a century after her last Olympic final, and 76 years since she competed in Yarrawonga for the thrill of it, for the thruppences, and to show people she was special.
"I didn't think it a big deal," she says.
"I thought it was my responsibility to carry it over the line. That seemed the natural thing to do when you receive a baton. It was difficult but I made it."
The price and value of an Olympic gold medal revealed
The Mexico City 80m hurdles Olympic gold medal has been kept in a safe for half a century.
The medal is a wonderful memory of a race, evidence that the right balance of talent and hard training brings success, and a reminder that childhood dreams are good and necessary for some people to live full lives.
But it is also just a medal.
Last year, Ross Jones, 72, required open heart surgery to repair a valve.
He's fine now, but his health scare was a reminder for Ross and Maureen to think about their future.
The couple owned their property but they did not feel "well off", and they were not eligible for pensions.
Maureen thought perhaps she could sell the medal.
If the couple had children it would go to them, but they had no children.
"We're getting older and we're going to need all our resources," she told her husband.
"It can get very expensive."
In May this year, the medal went to auction alongside a Don Bradman bat, which went unsold, a Nathan Buckley jumper ($16,000), and Clarrie Grimmett's baggy green cap ($11,000).
Tipped to attract bids between $20,000 and $25,000, the rare Mexico City prize fetched $36,000.
Maureen Jones also auctioned her 1968 team blazer, Australian bag, and the singlet she wore during the final ($1700), as well as her 2000 Australian Sports Medal ($650).
She does not miss the medal or any of the other stuff.
"I wanted to get rid of it for a long time," she says.
"But I didn't while my mother was alive. It meant something to her. I only think of the things I did to achieve that, not the medal itself."
Mr Jones wonders about the sale of the medal in relation to his wife's long lost father.
"I never met her father," he says.
"Her father was a genuine, stoic person from what I could gather and learned from other people. I wished I had've met him. She was very close to her father.
"The gold medal, and (then) she lost her father. It (the medal) didn't have a great connection with her in that respect. She'd much rather have had a normal life with her father than the gold medal. I sort of think about that at times. Her father was still the most important thing, the gold medal was way down the list."
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