Diary of a golden girl DAME YVETTE'S TERROR & TRIUMPH

While researching the life of a New Zealand Olympic great, author Angela Walker reveals how their sporting paths collided

- Fleur Guthrie

Like Yvette, Angela was a gold medallist and they even had the same coach.

On her 18th birthday in 1947, aspiring Dunedin long jumper Yvette Williams received an extra-large scrapbook.

Despite being told she would gain unsightly muscles if she carried on with athletics, her parents had proudly cut out newspaper articles from her season that needed a home. Yvette went to her bedroom, opened it at her desk and carefully wrote "My Sporting Life" onto the first page.

Being an athlete was an unorthodox choice for a young woman of that era. All her friends were getting married and having children. Her own boyfriend at the time wanted her to do the same.

But holding on to her dream, Yvette wrote in her diary: "One year today is the opening of the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, so I just wonder if I'll be there. Either that or doing housework, I suppose."

It's this scrapbook and never-before-seen diaries that author Angela Walker has drawn on to recreate the day-to-day world of the late Kiwi icon in her new book Ideals Are Like Stars.

Author Angela was given accesss to all Yvette's scrapbooks and diaries.

It coincides with the 70th anniversary of Dame Yvette Williams becoming the first New Zealand woman to win an Olympic gold medal - a feat not repeated until windsurfer Barbara Kendall won gold 40 years later.

Angela believes Yvette's life story is one that is long overdue being told.

"I was absolutely flabbergasted there hadn't been a book done on her before, when she's well worthy of having her legacy in print," she asserts.

"No one else had 'forgotten' to write the biographies of Peter Snell, Murray Halberg or John Walker - all of her male counterparts."