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.

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. 

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. 

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 a