Iolanda Balas occupies a special niche in athletics history, for she dominated her event - the high jump - like no one else in the sport. For a whole decade she went unbeaten, not merely winning an astonishing 140 consecutive competitions but invariably crushing the opposition. She was indeed in a class apart.

Her motivation was not from beating her opponents - that could be taken for granted from 1957 until leg injuries began to take their toll in 1967 - but in constantly improving. She established the first of 14 world records in 1956 with a leap of 1.75m and finished up in 1961 with 1.91m, on the way becoming the first woman to jump six feet (1.83m). She captured Olympic titles in 1960 and 1964 by huge margins, and such was her supremacy that at the time she cleared 1.91m no other woman had gone higher than 1.78m.

Some of her luckless contemporaries complained that they had no chance against her because she was so very tall (1.85m, or nearly 6ft 1in) with particularly long legs even for that height. But that physical advantage was largely cancelled out by her inability to master the more efficient straddle and western roll techniques of the pre-Fosbury Flop era. She explained: "My style is quite obsolete but it suits my body structure."

Balas, a Romanian of Hungarian origin born in Transylvania in 1936, was married to her coach and fellow high jumper Ion Soeter (he died in 1987). She is now a leading international official.