大象传媒

What do sprinters Colin Jackson, Frankie Fredericks and Merlene Ottey have in common?

The answer is that they all famously failed to win Olympic gold.

Despite winning two world and four European championship titles during a 17-year career, , at the 1988 Seoul Games.

, winning four silvers at the Barcelona and Atlanta Games in the 100m and 200m races.

But it is dubbed the Queen without a crown, that I want to focus on today.

The Jamaican, turned Slovenian, sprinter won 14 World Championship medals including three golds, but of her nine Olympic medals, none are gold.

Ottey began her quest at the 1980 Moscow Games, winning a bronze in the 200m at the age of 20.

Three more third place finishes followed at the 1984 and 1992 Games, although the biggest heartbreak in Barcelona came in the 100m where Ottey finished fifth, just six-hundredths of a second behind the winner, America's Gail Devers.

Four years later, Ottey came even closer to winning gold, but was again denied by Devers.

and Ottey and Devers were given the same time, 10.94 seconds, but the officials gave the verdict to the American, despite Jamaican protests.

At the 2000 Sydney Games, there was but Ottey anchored the 4x100m relay team to second place and although she missed out on an individual 100m medal by just one-hundredth of a second, she was later promoted after winner .

But the issues surrounding her selection for Sydney led Ottey to declare she would never run for Jamaica again and in 2002 she became a citizen.

Her final Olympic appearance came in Athens four years ago, making her only the second woman, along with Swedish fencer Kirstin Palm, to have competed at seven Olympic Games.

At the age of 44, Ottey went out in the semi-finals of the 100m.

Her Olympic tally of three silvers and six bronzes is the most medals achieved by a female athlete, but I've stopped short of calling her an Olympic great due to the lack of gold.

In my eyes she is the best athlete never to have won gold on the Olympic stage, would you agree?