ON THIS DAY 3 8 2023

This Day in History: March 8

Featured Event

1702

British throne ascended by Anne










British throne ascended by Anne






On this day in 1702, Anne became the last Stuart monarch of Great Britain, having earlier acquiesced to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which designated as her successors the Hanoverian descendants of King James I.

Lidiya Skoblikova


Russian skater






Lidiya Skoblikova, in full Lidiya Pavlovna Skoblikova, (born March 8, 1939, Zlatoust, Russian S.F.S.R.), Russian speed skater who became the first athlete to win four gold medals in a single Winter Olympic competition (1964). The combination of these four medals with the two she had won in 1960 made her also the first athlete to earn six gold medals in the Olympic Winter Games.
In 1957 Skoblikova established Soviet records for women in the 1,500-metre and 3,000-metre races. She won a gold medal in each of those events in the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, California, U.S. On Feb. 20–21, 1963, at the world championship competition in Karuizawa, Japan, she set a world record in the 1,000-metre event (1 min 31.8 sec) and also won the title in the 500-metre race. At the 1964 Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, she finished first in the four women’s skating races—500, 1,000, 1,500, and 3,000 metres—that then comprised the competition.


Educated at the Chelyabinsk Pedagogic Institute, Skoblikova taught physiology there from 1962 until 1974. That year she was appointed head of the physical education department at a university in Moscow.