The Guardian wrote:
It had been such a consuming and dramatic pentathlon that she accepted a cigarette offered afterwards by her closest rival, Heide Rosendahl from West Germany. I laugh and Peters hangs her head in mock shame when she admits that the five events spread across two days had been so tense that she actually smoked a whole pack of cigarettes in between competing.
“It’s ridiculous and I don’t like children to read that. A doctor said to me once: ‘Imagine if you didn’t smoke. How good could you really have been?’ I said: ‘I couldn’t be better than gold.’ But almost everyone on the team smoked back then. We all used to race to duty-free to get our bottles and our cigarettes. But I quit smoking in 1974 because I was collecting money to build this track and I didn’t want anybody to see me smoking. I’m really glad I stopped.”
