“The bright little stadium in the country, well sheltered by a belt of high trees”, as it was fondly described some 60 years ago, still stands. The woodland clusters round, as it has for centuries. The pallid sunlight slants through the branches on a brisk early-spring morning. A familiar figure comes padding out of the shadows and across the grass, balding head, arms pumping furiously, “one moment looking like a super-tuned machine, the next like a fugitive from justice”, as one acute observer wrote of him.

 In the wake of “The Gateshead Clipper”, Jack Potts, an overlooked Olympic hero      Jack Potts, fourth from right, in the winning English cross-country team (Paris, 1935) There was a time, back in the days of amateurism, when some British athletes of real international class missed out on the Olympic Games because they could not afford to lose their income while they were away from work. Now, in this age of rabid professionalism, the selectors choose only to send those competitors who they think could win medals in the belief that the greater the number of medals the more generous will be central funding. Other athletes not so highly thought of are denied their big-time opportunity, even when the necessary finance is available. No thought seems to be given to the idea that young and promising athletes not yet ready to challenge the very best would benefit from the experience of going to a Games, and would do rather better next time round.   

Jamaica's 43-year-old 800m RecordDesperately needed after 40 years, a new man to succeed “one of the special ones”There’s a strange anomaly in the list of Jamaican national records. Usain Bolt’s times are, of course, phenomenal, and the 400 metres is understandably a shade less impressive but still of a very fine class, 43.93 by Rusheen McDonald in 2015. So why is the 800 metres so ordinary? And why does it still stand after 43 years?Seymour Newman ran 1:45.2 in 1977. Making comparisons by means of the Hungarian Scoring Tables points system which equates all events, that’s as if Don Quarrie still holds his country’s 100 metres record from that year at 10.19 – he actually ran 10.12 in 1977. Not only that but 59 national records at 800 metres are currently better than Jamaica’s, including those of Djibouti, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Latvia, Puerto Rico, Senegal and even three others which haven’t existed for 30 years or so, East Germany, the USSR and Yugoslavia. Yet Newman was among the best exponents of his generation at both 400 and 800 metres, and the Jamaican AAA website rightly says oi him, “Newman’s prowess on the track marked him as the successor to Arthur Wint and George Kerr, the great Jamaican 400 and 800 runners of the past”.

James Kibblewhite: Great All-Rounder of the Victorian Age The “cudgel-maker” of the 1890s: head-to-head from 880 yards to 10 miles Just imagine some enterprising promoter getting Wayde van Niekerk and Mo Farah together for a one-to-one speed-v-stamina show-down at 1000 metres ! It would no doubt cost a packet of money, and maybe even then not enough to tempt the pair of them away from the relentless Grand Prix round where running yet another 400 metres or 5000 metres rewards them so lavishly. Back in the 1890s there were no such inhibitions among the leading athletes about switching distances, and even though the financial return when Edgar Bredin lined up against James Kibblewhite was not quite on the same level as in 2017 it was still a highly attractive proposition. It’s reliably reckoned that the leading amateurs of the 1890s were regularly being paid £5 a meeting in appearance money until the AAA finally clamped down and suspended for life several of the “super-stars” of that era. A fiver in 1892 is worth some 700 times more in today’s values.

Looking forward to a “spanking set-to” and the occasional “bumpy match.” The first noted Irish distance man of the 20th Century.  The opening few years of the International Cross Country Championships, starting in 1903, were very largely a demonstration of the superiority of the English representatives. England won all 14 team titles through to 1921, and would have had more but for the tragic intervention of World War I, before France broke the monopoly, and it was also a Frenchman, Jean Bouin, later to be killed in military action, who was the first non-English individual winner, doing so for three successive years, 1911-12-13. The earliest challenge, though, had come from the Irish. John Daly was 3rd in 1903 and 4th in 1904 and 1906. Tom Hynes was 2nd in 1905. Both were born in the same county in Ireland and were members of Galway City Harriers.

                                Finish of the 1952 Olympic Final in Helsinki Germany returned to the Olympics in Helsinki seven years after the end of World War II, and in athletics three silver medals and three bronze medals, including those for the 800, 1500 and 5000 metres, were won. Writing in the British Olympic Association’s Official Report, Harold Abrahams – happily, as he admitted, “wallowing” in statistics – made the valid point that top six placings, of which the USA had 34, the USSR (competing for the first time at the Games) 20, Great Britain 15 and Germany 11. were as significant as medals in judging a country’s strength. However, such a favourable outcome might still have been a cause of some embarrassment to the then president of the German athletics federation, Max Danz.

      Julot, the French idol. “Above all of us others”, said Nurmi The life of Jules Ladoumègue Author’s note: John Cobley’s profile of Jules Ladoumègue on this website covers his competitive career in admirable detail, and this article is intended to complement that. Living in France, I can hopefully bring a further perspective to the contribution made to French athletics by Ladoumègue, with whom all subsequent middle-distance record-breakers from that country are still compared. 

   It’s a competitive record of which any athlete would be justly proud – a European title, an Olympic silver medal, a World record – but Lennart Strand’s track career is invariably depicted in rather different terms. “Before a race, every race, any race, he is as nervous as a debutante before her first ball, even if his opponents are second-raters”, once wrote a journalist from Strand’s native Sweden. “He has come out to start a race without a vest. His friends are afraid that he may one day appear without anything”. 

“You’re under the record! Keep going!” And Spurrier did just that.More Than 60 Years Ago: a Golden Era of 800-Metre Running Remembered Sixty years ago the supreme track test of speed, stamina and sensitive tactics, the 800 metres, underwent a transformation. The World record, which had been held by Rudolf Harbig, of Germany, since 1939, was at long last beaten, and by two runners in the same race. When Roger Moens, of Belgium, and Audun Boysen, of Norway, became the first men to break 1min 46sec in Oslo on 3 August 1955 their achievement was rightly hailed as one of the most important in the advance of athletic standards. The record was no great surprise, though the margin was. Moens had run 1:47.0 five weeks before and Boysen 1:47.4 the year previous, though neither had won the European title. Yet they very nearly could have been upstaged earlier in 1955 by a man who a few months earlier had ranked only 53rd.in the World

    Choosing 12 kilometres as the distance for one of your first races at the age of 14 is not the wisest of decisions, but everything turned out alright for Luigi Beccali in the long run – or rather, one could say, in a series of shorter runs. An Olympic gold medal and two World records at 1500 metres are enviable achievements by any measure. In purely statistical terms, he was the first man run under 3min 50sec for the distance twice – and, for that matter, three times – and though this might not seem too impressive now it’s a feat which is justifiably still thought to be of great significance more than 90 years later by anyone with a real sense of athletics history.