Betty Judge
Australian athletics coach

Betty Beazley (née Judge; 21 March 1921 – 13 September 2015), known as Betty Judge during her career, was an Australian athletics world record holder at 880 yards, 330 yards and 300 metres. She coached the Olympic champion Shirley Strickland, and was also the mother of Kim Beazley, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Governor of Western Australia.
Athletics career
Judge's athletics career spanned the period 1939 to 1947. She set world and national records for 880 yards, 330 yards and 300 metres.
On 2 March 1940 Judge broke the world 880 yards record at the Western Australian State Amateur Athletic Championships at Leederville Oval with a time of 2 minutes 24.7 seconds, 1/9 second inside the old world record that was set by Mary Lines in 1922. On 8 February 1947 she broke the record again by 0.5 second during an inter-club championship at Leederville Oval. The Australian record stood until 13 December 1947 when broken by Kit Mears at the Victorian State Championships.
On 13 April 1940 Judge broke the world 300 metres record at the Women's Pageant of Sport at the WACA with a time of 39.9 seconds, 0.1 second inside the world record.
On 15 February 1941 she broke the world 330 yards sprint record at Leederville Oval with a time of 39.8 seconds.
Coaching and official career
Betty Judge was the first coach of Olympic champion Shirley Strickland, who set at least two world records and won seven Olympic Games medals.
The public source identifies “Betty Judge” as australian athletics coach. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Betty, Judge and Australian.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4898868. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 2015, 1939 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Betty Judge” 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.