Scot won gold at the 1970 Games just hours after her husband's hammer victory and later became a prolific world masters record-breaker.

Rosemary Payne, who won Commonwealth discus gold for Scotland in 1970 and then enjoyed a remarkable second sporting life as the world masters record-breaker Rosemary Chrimes, has died aged 93.

Her death was announced on Friday (Nov 6) by Halesowen Athletics & Cycling Club, whom she represented in masters competition. "She was an inspiration to all those she helped," said club chair Kathryn Williets.

Scottish Athletics also paid tribute to the Kelso-born thrower, an Olympian who represented Great Britain at three European Championships.

Her finest hour came on the opening day of the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, Saturday July 18, in one of the great days for a sporting couple. The men's hammer started at 1.30pm at Meadowbank and her husband, Howard Payne, comfortably won his third Commonwealth title as England filled the podium. Two hours later the women's discus began and it was obvious from the opening throw that Scotland was about to celebrate a gold medallist of its own.

Payne opened with 53.18m and a second-round 54.46m sealed the win, with all four of her legal throws beating the 51.02m best of Australia's silver medallist, Jean Roberts. Husband and wife had won gold medals within a couple of hours of each other, and Lachie Stewart added a second Scottish triumph in the 10,000m shortly afterwards.

From Kelso to Edinburgh

Born Christine Rosemary Charters in Kelso on May 19, 1933, she turned her hand to the hurdles, jumps and throws at Edinburgh University and captained its hockey team in 1957. She later said it was her brother-in-law, a vet who happened to be a discus thrower, who urged her to go to university and join the discus team.

Her talent soon showed. She won discus bronze (30.15m) at the 1954 Scottish Championships and her first Scottish title in the shot (10.89m) in 1959. By the time she stepped away from the sport in 1975, she had won nine Scottish titles – three in the shot and six in the discus – along with three silver and six bronze medals, one of them in the first Scottish pentathlon championship in 1959.

She captained Scotland at the 1958 Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, finishing 10th in the discus with 34.96m. Competing in the men's throws there for Northern Rhodesia was Howard Payne. The pair married in Birmingham in February 1960 and later that year had twins, one of whom, Russell, won a hammer bronze at the 1988 Scottish Championships.

British record-breaker

After a pause for motherhood, her breakthrough came in 1963 when she threw 43.43m at Pitreavie in June and made her Great Britain debut against the USA that August. A year later, with her fifth-round effort at a floodlit Birchfield Harriers meeting in September, she threw 48.07m for the British record. She held the record for 13 years, improving it many times to 58.02m in 1972, before it was surpassed by Meg Ritchie in 1977.

A below-par fourth place at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston left her disillusioned. Applying to the discus some of the training principles that had helped Howard improve as a hammer thrower, she stopped throwing the discus in training and worked indoors instead with a strap discus in front of a full-length mirror to perfect her technique. The perseverance paid off in 1969, when she moved the British record forward to 52.22m, and it set the stage for her golden day in Edinburgh the following year.

Between 1969 and 1974 she reached the final at three European Championships and at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where she placed 12th aged 39. At the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, her fourth for Scotland, she led after the first round with 53.66m and improved to 53.94m with her last throw to take silver behind Canada's Jane Haist, who won with 55.52m. She also placed seventh in the shot with 14.19m.

She made the last of her 51 appearances for Great Britain that September, winning against Finland with 52.56m, and bowed out of competition altogether in 1975 because of knee and elbow injuries. She moved into administration and team management, coaching and managing young athletes.

A second career

Retirement did not last. In the mid-1980s she returned to competition, now under the name Rosemary Chrimes, and quickly found her feet among the veterans. Her name appeared multiple times in the pages of AW and also on our website as she set world indoor age-group records in the shot (12.48m) in 1986 and the high jump (1.30m) in 1987, then at the 1988 European Veterans Games won gold medals in the W55 category at 100m, 80m hurdles, shot, discus and high jump. The shot was a world age-group record, the hurdles and high jump equalled her own world marks and she even broke the British 100m record in her heat.

Her versatility and longevity were remarkable. At the 2003 World Masters Championships in Puerto Rico, aged 70, she won gold medals in the high jump (1.26m), shot (10.68m) and discus (31.29m), with the high jump and discus world age-group records. In all she set more than 20 world masters records, continuing to do so in her 70s and 80s, and in 2019, aged 86, she added four more British masters records. She later said she had "such great fun" in masters athletics, a world she had not known existed until she retired.

In 2014 the University of Glasgow awarded her an honorary degree in recognition of her sporting achievements.

Photographer Alex Rotas once described her as "elegant, bespectacled, immaculate" and said you would never guess she had been a record-breaking athlete all her life. Asked why her career had lasted so long, she replied that she had "kept sport in its place as a life-long interest" alongside plenty of other activities and passions.