Rand, who was born in Wells, Somerset, on 10 February 1940, was a prodigious talent, attending Millfield School on a sports scholarship before being expelled after going to Paris with her then boyfriend and becoming engaged.<\/p>\n
She burst on to the international scene at 18 with long jump silver at the 1958 Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, and set a British record on her Olympic debut in Rome in 1960.<\/p>\n
Four years later and now a wife and mother to the first of her three daughters, Rand set an Olympic record with her first-round jump. Her final jump of 6.76m broke the world record.<\/p>\n
In an era of amateurism, all her success came when she was working part-time in the postal office at a Guinness factory in London.<\/p>\n
She was described as “Marilyn Monroe on spikes” by a former national athletics coach and also caught the eye of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.<\/p>\n
“I was at the BBC one day and the Beatles were there. I met two of them – Ringo [Starr] and George [Harrison] I think,” Rand told Sky Sports in 2023.<\/p>\n
“And then Mick Jagger – I never actually met him, but they asked him if he could go on a date with anybody and he said it would be me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rand, who was born in Wells, Somerset, on 10 February 1940, was a prodigious talent, attending Millfield School…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-500232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}