Jill Pollard

Jill Pollard was the daughter of Carrie Pickles, three times British women’s gymnastics champion and 1928 Olympic team bronze medallist. Jill’s younger sister Jan was also a leading gymnast. Jill followed in her mother’s footsteps and competed in the Olympics, at Roma in 1960. She was selected only as one of the two reserves, however, with Cardiff’s Mary McCarthy. Two months before the start of the Games, Denise Goddard was ruled out of the British team because she was too young and her place went to Pollard,

Also like her mother, Pollard was the Yorkshire champion and she too went on to become a successful coach. Pollard guided Anne Parkinson of the Saltaire Ladies GC to the British title in 1973, having the previous year coached the Saltaire team of Parkinson, Barbara Alred, Sheila Biggs, Lorraine Kirk, and Clare Wade to the British team title. Pollard later turned her attention to the new British sport of Sports Acrobatics and played a large part in it being introduced to many clubs up and down the UK. The majority of the members of the British team that took part in the 1976 Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships at Saarbrücken, West Germany, were from Pollard’s club, Acro One. By profession, Pollard was a clerk at a well-known Yorkshire building society.