Canadian 1948 Olympian Shirley Olafsson wants to carry torch at 2012 London Games

Shirley Gordon Olafsson has a dream of running in the torch relay at next year's Summer Olympic Games in London.

Two things make that dream unique. Olafsson is an 84-year-old Canadian widow who competed in the 1948 London Games, the first Olympics after the Second World War.

And she did it after overcoming a disability that should by rights have kept her out of sports altogether, never mind the Olympics.

Olafsson, born in Vancouver, came into the world with a deformed foot, reports Tom Hawthorn in the Globe and Mail. Today she wears a size 9 1/2 right shoe and a 5 1/2 left.

As a child, she endured several operations and wore a clunky boot with metal braces that set her apart from her peers. Despite the treatments, her left foot remained withered, its ankle locked and the calf muscle weak.

But despite a pronounced limp Olafsson was determined to play sports. Her childhood experiences were dismal, including a field-hockey coach who said she'd be more useful as a goalpost than a player.

"Nobody wanted me anywhere," she said.

So she turned to individual sports and settled on the high jump. The training was hard, made harder by the weakness in her left leg that meant she had to take off and land on her right.

"I kind of hopped over the bar on one foot," she said.

A friend helped her join a prestigious Vancouver track club and she trained under veteran coaches at Stanley Park.

In 1943 she won her first ribbon in the 1943 inter-city high school championships. A few years later, she placed second in the Canadian championships, earning a spot on the Canadian Olympic team for the 1948 Games in London.

It drew a wave of publicity, with headlines such as "Crippled girl becomes B.C. Olympic star," and "Transformation of cripple into star athlete."

Olafsson finished 11th in the high jump, which was won by American Alice Coachman, the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

Two years later, she tied for fifth at the British Empire Games in Auckland, New Zealand. She continued to be involved in sports after she married - her husband Herbert Olafsson was a member of Canada's national basketball team at the 1954 world championships and the '59 Pan Am Games.

Olafsson still exercises daily and curls once a week. She took part on the torch relay for the 2008 Paralympic Games in China and in the relay for last year's Vancouver Winter Olympics.

She's applied to the London organizers to run in next year's torch relay. "They should know," Hawthorn writes, "that she is not one to calmly accept rejection."