Dame Mary Alison Glen Haig MBE CBE 1918 - 2014

Olympic fencer and redoubtable sports administrator who served on the IOC

Peter Nichols

Mary Glen Haig, second left, with teammates in 1951: from left, Margaret Somerville, Jean Witchell Leaf, Gillian Sheen and Liz Williams. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

 Mary Glen Haig, who has died aged 96, competed as a fencer in four Olympic Games between 1948 and 1960, and was subsequently a formidable sports administrator who, for 12 years, was one of Britain’s two representatives on the International Olympic Committee.

Her Olympic career began in London. The 1948 austerity Games, as they were known – the entire budget was less than £750,000 – marked some sort of return to sporting normality after the second world war, though conditions were spartan. Glen Haig shared a room with two other women, sleeping on camp beds. The night before her competition, she had been working in her job as an administrator at King’s College hospital. When asked if her work colleagues were impressed with her Olympic selection, she said: “I don’t think they were too bothered. I think when you’ve had a war and ghastly things to contend with … things like winning medals, we didn’t worry about things like that in those days.”

London, at which she was a finalist, finishing eighth, was the first of four successive Olympic appearances for Glen Haig, though she never bettered that performance. In the Empire Games (now the Commonwealth Games), she enjoyed far more success, winning the individual gold medal in the foil in 1950 at Auckland and in 1954 at Vancouver. She also came fourth in the 1950 world fencing championships in Monaco, which remains the best placing by a British woman.

But her pre-eminence in British fencing ended in 1956, when Gillian Sheen, 10 years her junior, won the Olympic title in Melbourne. Glen Haig was part of the British team for another four years, but she had already taken the first steps in an administrative career that would be her focus for the next 50 years.

Daughter of Captain William James and his wife, Mary (nee Bannochie), she was born in Islington, north London, and educated locally at Dame Alice Owen’s school. Her father was a fencer and sparked her interest. In an interview with the Guardian in 2008, Glen Haig explained: “He was asked to help at the Regent Street Polytechnic and round the back they had a building where they started women’s fencing … he was asked to get it off the ground and he took me with him.” At 14, Glen Haig became a member of the Poly’s inaugural women’s team.

In 1948, as well as competing at the London Olympics, she became the British representative on the International Fencing Association (FIE) and thereafter occupied any number of posts in British and international fencing. Outside her own sport, she chaired the British Olympic Association Medical Trust and the Central Council for Physical Recreation; she was a member of the British Sports Council and president of the British Sports Association for the Disabled. She held a host of other honorary positions, and all the while continued full-time work as a hospital administrator.

Glen Haig’s most important posting came in 1982 when a place became vacant on the International Olympic Committee. The IOC was not a progressive organisation and had enlisted its first two female members only the previous year – the Venezuelan Flor Isava-Fonseca and Norway’s Pirjo Haeggman – but it was known that the president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, wanted a third woman on the committee. So, though the names of Roger Bannister, Arthur Gold, Charles Palmer and Denis Howell were bandied about, it was Glen Haig who got the nod.

For the next 12 years, she was a forceful presence on the IOC. She would not accept expensive gifts from would-be Olympic applicants (a practice that would eventually result in the Salt Lake City bribery scandal in 1999) and she was never afraid to speak her mind. Her principles, though, are best illustrated by the Onischenko affair. In the 1976 Olympic modern pentathlon, the Soviet Boris Onischenko appeared to be scoring hits in the fencing discipline without making contact. If matters had been left to Jim Fox, the gentlemanly captain of the British team, Onischenko would probably have got just a warning. But Glen Haig was watching from the stands and intervened, with the result that Onischenko’s epée was dismantled and its rigged wiring exposed.

Glen Haig was appointed MBE in 1971 and CBE in 1977, and in the 1993 New Year’s Honours list was made a dame.

In 1943, she had married Andrew Glen Haig, but two days after the wedding her husband, who worked for the intelligence services, was drafted to Burma. When he returned at the end of the war, they agreed to go their separate ways, though she kept his name.

Mary Alison Glen Haig, fencer, born 12 July 1918; died 15 November 2014