Born Elzbieta Dunska on November 11 in 1934, Krzesinska and her family were forced to move to Elblag in 1944 after their house was burned down during the Warsaw Uprising. 

In 1952, at the age of 18, Krzesińska made her Olympic debut in Helsinki, her talent having been discovered by her teach, but it was not without controversy.

After landing her best jump, she was in the silver medal position.

Prompted by a protest from the Hungarian team, however, the judges ruled that Krzesińska’s long plaited hair had left a mark in the sand approximately half-a-metre behind where the rest of her body landed. 

The decision meant her jump did not count and she finished 12th. 

Krzesińska won a bronze medal at the European Championships in 1954 in Bern and two years later set a world record of 6.35 metres in, perhaps fittingly bearing in mind what happened at the Olympics, Budapest. 

Krzesińska competed under her new married name at Melbourne 1956 after marrying coach Andrew Krzesinski.

She equalled her world record in the second round to win the Olympic gold medal, the first won by a Polish woman since the controversial Stanisława Walasiewicz had claimed victory in the 100 metres at Los Angeles in 1932. 

After giving birth to her daughter Elzbieta in 1958, Krzesińska  returned to defend her Olympic title at Rome 1960 but suffered an injury on the eve of the Games and underwent surgery two weeks before they opened. 

She still competed and won a silver medal behind the Soviet Union's Vera Krepkina, despite having to compete in a pair of men's spikes two sizes too big because she had lost hers. 

Krzesińska’s last major medal came at the 1962 European Championships in Belgrade, winning the silver behind another Soviet, Tatyana Shchelkanova. 

Krzesińska retired in 1965 and went on to work as a dentist in Britain and the United States. 

She returned to Warsaw in 2003. 

In 1994 she released her memoirs in a book entitled The Sweeping Plait.