Anne-Marie Colchen
French basketball player and athletics competitor (1925-2017)

Anne-Marie Colchen-Maillet (8 December 1925 – 26 January 2017) was a French track and field athlete and women's basketball player. She became France's first high jump champion at the 1946 European Athletics Championships and held the French record for the event for ten years. She represented France in high jump at the 1948 Summer Olympics. In basketball, she was the highest scorer at the 1953 FIBA World Championship for Women, helping France to third place. She was a member of the French national team for the European Women's Basketball Championship in 1950, 1952, 1954, and 1956. She was inducted into the French Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005.
Career
Born in Le Havre, she joined up with the local sports club, the Association Sportive Augustin Normand (ASAN). Standing at a height of 1.82 m (5 ft 11+1⁄2 in) – unusually tall for a woman in that era – she found she had a natural talent for high jump and basketball.
Athletics
Colchen first emerged as a high jumper in the mid-1940s, and she ranked in the world's top twenty in 1944, clearing five feet (1.5 m). She rose to the peak of the international scene with a gold medal win at the 1946 European Athletics Championships, holding off the Soviet all-round athlete Aleksandra Chudina with her winning height of 1.60 m (5 ft 2+3⁄4 in).
“Anne-Marie Colchen” enters the record as french basketball player and athletics competitor (1925-2017). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Anne-Marie, Colchen and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Anne-Marie Colchen” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Anne-Marie, Colchen and French provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q273561. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2017, 1946 and 1948.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Anne-Marie Colchen”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Anne-Marie Colchen primary sources, Anne-Marie Colchen archive and Anne-Marie research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Anne-Marie Colchen”?
- Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
- Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Anne-Marie Colchen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.