Valentina Tikhomirova

Tikhomirova had four straight pentathlon wins at national level from 1969 to 1972, including a championship best of 5120 at the 1971 Spartakiade, which was never bettered (the heptathlon replaced the pentathlon the programme in 1981). She remained among the world's best in her event, but narrowly missed out on further medals in the rest of her career, placing fourth at the 1969 European Athletics Championships and fifth at both the 1971 European Athletics Championships and 1972 Summer Olympics.

She represented the Soviet Union at the Olympic Games twice (1968, 1972) and competed two further times at the European Athletics Championships (1969, 1971), placing in the top five at all four events but failing to win any medals. She had a best of 5234 points, based on the points table at the time.

The retirement of Irina Press in 1967 saw Tikhomirova enter a period of success. At the national Spartakiade in 1967 she won with a score of 4946 points –a new personal high. She ranked third internationally that season, just three points behind world leaders Ingrid Becker and Annamária Tóth. She surpassed five thousand points for the pentathlon for the first time in the 1968 season, with her score of 5008 points in Nalchik.

The instigation of a controversial sex verification test by the International Amateur Athletics Federation for the 1966 European Athletics Championships saw many key women miss the tournament in protest, among them Press and Shchelkanova. This left Tikhomirova as the Soviet Union's sole representative in the pentathlon and she duly won the gold medal with a score of 4787 points, extending Soviet dominance in the event since 1954 (Aleksandra Chudina and Galina Bystrova being her predecessors). She defeated West Germany's Heide Rosendahl by a margin of 22 points.

Fellow Soviet Irina Press was among the world's leading athletes at that time, meaning Tikhomirova had strong competition at national level. In 1963 she placed fourth at the Soviet Spartakiade, which was won by Tatyana Shchelkanova. She reached the national podium for the first time at the Soviet Athletics Championships in 1966, behind both Press and Shchelkanova. Despite failing to break into the top two at national level, her season's best performances ranked her highly at global level: she was seventh in the world in 1964 with a personal best of 4775 points, then reached the top five in the 1965 season with a score of 4763 points.

Born Valentina Lomakina (Russian: Ломакина) in Makhachkala, Dagestan (then the Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union), she began to establish herself in the women's pentathlon in the early 1960s.

Valentina Nikolayevna Tikhomirova (Russian: Валентина Николаевна Тихомирова; born 28 June 1941) is a Russian former track and field athlete who competed in the women's pentathlon for the Soviet Union. She was the gold medallist at the 1966 European Athletics Championships and a five-time national pentathlon champion.