The Aotearoa Track Council corrected its record on Thursday, naming Heuer the winner of the 1991 New Zealand women’s 10,000m championship in Dunedin. The result was reversed after a five-member panel examined the photograph and a carbon timing slip, both found by chance in a secondhand frame.
The slip records Heuer’s bib number, 41, ahead of bib 14, worn by the runner officially declared the winner. The finish image appears to confirm the order. Heuer, now 61, said she protested on race day but was told the judges’ result would stand. “I thought I had misremembered it all these years,” she said. “Then I saw that little number on the paper.”
The paper behind the picture
Mirella Bianco, a Christchurch bicycle mechanic, paid NZ$18 (about €9 or US$10) for a framed landscape at a Saturday market. When she replaced its bowed backing board, an envelope slipped out. Inside were the race photograph and a folded results slip bearing the date, the meet’s name and a timekeeper’s initials.
Bianco had never met Heuer and did not know the result was disputed. She searched old newspaper reports, found Heuer’s name in the race listing and contacted the track council. “It felt too specific to be a keepsake someone had forgotten,” she said. “I kept thinking: if I put this back in a drawer, nobody else will ever see it.”
The council compared the slip with its surviving championship ledger and interviewed Patrick T. Desjardins, a retired meet timekeeper whose initials match those on the note. He said officials had called the finish from handwritten bib numbers rather than a camera system. “I remember how easy it was to reverse two digits in the noise,” he said. “The photograph makes the correction hard to argue with.”
A title returned after decades
The 10,000m race covered 25 laps of the 400m (437-yard) track at Dunedin’s Caledonian Ground. The official result gave Heuer second place, three-tenths of a second behind Alexis Jónatans-Dónalds. The council said its panel found no evidence of misconduct; it concluded that the two athletes’ bib numbers had been transposed when the result was entered.
Jónatans-Dónalds, now 62, told the council she accepted the correction and congratulated Heuer. Heuer said the two had spoken briefly after the race, but she did not know the error had settled into the official record. “I’m not angry with Alexis,” she said. “We both ran the race we ran. It’s the piece of paper that got it wrong.”
Heuer left competitive running soon after the championship and did not pursue an appeal beyond her original protest. The council said it will issue her a replacement medal and amend its online results archive; it will also attach a note to the 1991 record explaining why the correction came so late.
For Bianco, the discovery has turned a routine market purchase into an unexpected piece of sports history. She has kept the frame, but given the evidence to the council for preservation. Heuer plans to attend the presentation of her medal in Dunedin later this month, 35 years after the finish she says she never forgot.
