It is a significant number in Ottey's remarkably long career and some might say she was unlucky to end up with a bronze medal 13 times at the Olympic Games - where she never won gold - and the World Championships, especially as she was often behind doping-tainted rivals.

There is another 13 among Ottey's magnificent achievements, one that is unlikely to ever to be beaten. She has been Jamaica's sportsperson of the year 13 times.

A 2.4 metre statue of Ottey - known as the Queen of the Track and revered by all the greats of Jamaican sport, including Usain Bolt - was unveiled in 2005 in Kingston's Independence Park.

The Commonwealth Games featured large in Ottey's career, which stretched from 1980 to 2012, a phenomenal length of time for a sprinter.

Her final international appearance was for Slovenia, the nation that gave her citizenship in 2002, four years after she moved there to be coached by Srdan Dordevic. She was 52-years-old when she bowed out. 

Ottey had already made the first of her record-breaking seven Olympic Games appearances (she finished third, of course, in Moscow in 1980) when she won her first gold medal in a major international event in 1982, the 200m at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games.

She won in 22.19sec from Kathy Cook (then Kathy Smallwood), one of the all-time great British female sprinters, who was running for England.

Try as she might throughout the rest of the 1980s, Ottey could not get the better of East German and American champions including Florence Griffith and Marita Koch - and she did not win gold again until eight years later, again at the Commonwealth Games.

This time Ottey did the sprint double, beating Australia's Kerry Johnson in both the 100m and 200m.

Back in third place in both events was Pauline Davis, who would win two Olympic gold medals for The Bahamas at the Sydney Olympic games 10 years later - the sprint relay "live" and the 200m nine years after the event when Marion Jones was stripped of her gold medal for doping.

Ottey's 1990 double in Auckland, and her other efforts in the same year, led to her being named World Athlete of the Year.

Ottey also won silver and bronze medals at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, respectively in the 100m and sprint relay.

Although she took Slovenian citizenship and moved to Europe, Ottey was an ambassador-at-large for Jamaica.

She was the fourth of seven children born to Hubert Ottey, a farmer, and his wife Joan, a midwife.

The whole family liked running but none took it as seriously as Merlene.

"It was not until I was about 14 that it dawned on me that I could have some sort of future in track," she said.

Watching on television as Don Quarrie won gold at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 inspired her, and soon after that her career was off and running.

She put in record-breaking performances on the US college circuit, having been awarded a scholarship in Nebraska, and started racing at elite level in 1979. A year later in Moscow she became the first West Indian woman to win an Olympic medal.

She did eventually win the 200m gold at the World Championships in 1993, and on her return to Jamaica from Stuttgart she was given a memorable welcome by a huge crowd.

But for the first 14 years of her remarkable career the only individual gold medals Ottey won were at the Commonwealth Games.

In 2004, before her final Olympic appearance, she said: "What keeps me going? I just enjoy it. It's got to the point where if I don't run I don’t feel good."