JUST months after leaving Southend High School for Girls in the summer of 1968 and aged just 18, multi-talented Ann Wilson was on her way to her first Olympic Games.

The Southend AC athlete – now Ann Sargent – was selected for the pentathlon, the long jump and the 80m hurdles at the Mexico Games of 1968 – appearing in the GB team alongside Mary Green who just weeks before was her PE teacher at Southend High.

Incredibly, it was not Ann’s first major competition, as two years earlier, aged just 16, she was part of the England team competing in the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica.

That is almost unheard of now. The modern-day equivalent to Ann would be Great Britain’s golden girl Jessica Ennis, also a multi-eventer.

Ennis burst on to the scene as a fresh-faced youngster at the Commonwealth Games in 2006 when she won a bronze medal in the heptahlon. She was 20 then. Ann was four years younger than her at her first Commonwealth Games.

“Being in Mexico at your first Olympics was quite overwhelming at the time,” said Ann, who was born and bred in Southend.

“But I had at least been to Jamaica for the Commonwealth Games and could use that as an experience.

“But when you are young I don’t think you really think about things too much.

“Now I’m older, I look back and think what an achievement it was. But I didn’t at the time.”

In fact, if anything, Ann says she was probably more nervous four years’ later when she was back at the Olympic, this time in Munich 1972, when she again competed in the pentathlon and the 100m hurdles – the women’s high hurdles sprint having been extended from 80m to the distance we know today by that time.

“I remember being on the blocks at the start of my hurdles race and my hands literally trembling,” said Ann. “I’ve always thought experience is over-rated. The more you know, the worse it is. It’s better to be young I think.”

Ann’s natural athletic ability was identified at an early age when she was a pupil at Thorpe Hall Junior School in Southend.

“My PE teacher at Thorpe Hall, Mr Shorney, saw I was a fast runner and a good high jumper and encouraged me and it went from there,” Ann recalled. “I tried to get into Southend AC as a 10 year old but had to wait until I was 11 before I could join. I only lived 80 yards away from the track in Southchurch Park and I was over there all the time.

“I was coached by George Holroyd and started mainly with high jump. I did that for a little while but George was a good coach and would get us to do other events which was good. I had a go at the high hurdles and did well and that’s where the multi-eventing started.

“Of course Southend High School for Girls was also a great school for athletics. I was not particularly clever but it was a great place to be for sport.”

Ann was still a pupil at Southend High when she made her international debut for England, aged just 15, in a Home Nations meeting in 1965, when she first went up against Northern Ireland’s future Olympic gold medallist Mary Peters.

“I beat her in the high jump and the long jump,” she said. “She got a bit better after that!”

She was also still a schoolgirl when she travelled to Kingston, Jamaica, for the Commonwealth Games a year later.

It was the start of a successful Commonwealth Games career that saw her win three silvers (in the pentathlon, high jump and long jump in Edinburgh in 1970) and a bronze (in the pentathlon in Christchurch in 1974).

But it was the Olympics that are the pinnacle for any athlete and Ann was no different.

She was part of a strong era of mutli-event women in Britain. Mary Rand had won silver in the pentathlon in Rome 1964 and Peters was to go on to win gold in Munich 1972.

Ann was very much among the bright lights of British multi-eventing but admits to never quite hitting her best at the Olympics.

She was 16th in Mexico, finishing 410 points behind winner Ingrid Becker, from West Germany. Four years later she was 13th, 522 points behind team-mate Peters who broke the world record to win gold.

Back then the women’s multi-event competition at the Olympics was the pentathlon – with the 200m, 100m hurdles, long jump, high jump and shot-putt making up the disciplines.

Today, of course, two events have been added to that – the javelin and 800m.

“Shot was my weakest event,” said Ann. “I weighed under nine stone and wasn’t particularly strong and that would let me down.

“But I was glad it was just the five events. I tell you what, I would not have wanted to do it if the 800m had been part of the event. I would have stuck to the high hurdles!”

She did compete twice individually over the high hurdles in both Mexico and Munich but was not able to make a final.

Her best performance in an individual event came in the long jump in Mexico where she jumped 6.30m – close to her personal best of 6.40m – to qualify for the final where she ended up in 13th place.

“Looking back I did OK at the Olympics, but not great,” said Ann, who now lives in Romford with husband Phillip Sargent. “I never did really well and got personal bests.

“I wouldn’t want to change the time I competed in, but I do look at the athletes of today with a bit of envy when I see what opportunities they are given.

“After coming back from the Mexico Olympics I went straight into a job and had to balance training with working. It’s hard.

“I would come home from work and go to train and have to hop over the fence if the track at Southchurch Park was closed, which it was every day apart from Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sunday mornings.

“The floodlights wouldn’t be on at the track so I’d have to train using the street lights as a guide!”

After juggling work commitments with training, as well as having to contend with a number of injuries, Ann called it a day aged 28.

“That wasn’t young back then,” she recalled. “Ann Packer retired at 22.”

She moved out of Southend in 1984 to move to Romford with husband Phil Sargent.

The couple have two daughters, Claire, 26, and Lucy, 23, with Lucy proving to be a real chip off the old block.

“Lucy is a really talented sprinter,” said Ann. “ She competed at the World Youth Championships in 2005, but has been suffering with injuries a lot lately.

“I coached her for some time and really enjoyed that.”

And of the future? “ I would like to move back to Southend one day,” said Ann. “It’s where I grew up and I still think of it as home.”