Preparing for the 1948 Olympic Games was a hurried business for the great majority of athletes who had served in military forces during World War II, which had only finally come to an end in August 1945, and even then more time had elapsed before the combatants were released from uniform. Others, more fortunate, had maintained their competitive activity either under enemy occupation or in privileged neutrality. Regaining the highest level was more difficult in some events than others, and a prime example was the 800 metres, in which the World record had been set at a daunting 1:46.6 by Rudolf Harbig, of Germany, 50 days before the war had broken out in 1939.

For the avid track and field enthusiasts – or at least for those in the USA – clear guidance as to pre-Olympic form across the full range of events was provided early in 1948 with the publication of a 70-page handbook, compiled by the pre-eminent statisticians, Roberto Quercetani and Donald Potts. This contained by far the most comprehensive lists of best ever performers to have appeared in print to that date, together with the leading 20 in each event during 1947. For example, the all-time 800 metres rankings began, of course, with Harbig and contained 99 other names down to 1:52.5. On the immediate following pages were another 60 who had achieved the equivalent time of 1:53.2 for 880 yards (804.67 metres). Who can say how many potential readers across the world, excited beyond measure by the prospect of access to such an unprecedented profusion of data, were able to deal with all the complexities of post-war foreign currency controls and send off their equivalent to $1.50, plus postage, to the publishers in Evanston, Illinois ? Aptly, the printers of this so highly valued publication were located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Jesse Owens had set his six World records of legend in a single afternoon in 1935.

Swedish athletes were the ones who had benefited most from not being drawn into the conflict at arms, but that was not immediately evident regarding the 800 metres. The supreme Swedish record-breakers of 1942 to 1945, Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, had set new standards at every distance from ¾-of-a-mile to 5000 metres, but the 800 was rather too short for them: Andersson, equal 32^nd at 1:50.8, Hägg outside the rankings completely at 1:52.8. The 1947 leaders were from New Zealand, the USA, France, Denmark and Jamaica before the first Swedish entrant, and seven of the top 20 would be among the nine finalists at the Olympics, which is a very fair return, considering the fickle form of even the very best of athletes. The top two of 1947 were Doug Harris, of New Zealand, and Johnny Fulton, of the USA, who in the same race had run faster than anyone else ever had, except for Harbig and for Sydney Wooderson, the British holder of the World 880 yards record. Next in line in 1947 came the Frenchman, Marcel Hansenne, and the Dane, Niels Holst-Sørensen. On active duty, Harris was still in the New Zealand army. The Jamaican, Arthur Wint, had served in the Royal Air Force during the war. A second  American, Tarver (“Cy”) Perkins, had been in the US Navy.  

Doug Harris and Johnny Fulton had met up in 1947 because Fulton was a member of a three-man AAU team sent to New Zealand at the beginning of the year, reviving an enterprise first undertaken in 1913. The visitors then had included a miler, James Powers, and in 1926  Lloyd Hahn, US mile champion to be that summer, had made the long voyage for a series of races against the local hero, Randolph Rose. Other leading US milers, Leo Lermond and Rufus Kiser, had followed in 1930 and 1931 respectively. Of the 1947 contestants Harris had solid credentials but was not yet by any means thought of as an Olympic medal contender – he had run 47.8 for 440 yards in 1945 and 1:52.6 for 880 yards in 1946. Fulton was a graduate of Stanford University, in California, and now a member of the San Francisco Olympic Club, with the status of US AAU half-mile title-holder and career best times of 48.1 and 1:51.0. Born in 1922, he had been a nationally ranked athlete since 1943 and was 2^nd in the AAU 880 the next year. On a 1946 tour to Europe he had even raced against Emil Zátopek at 1500 metres in Bratislava, narrowly losing 3:57.6 to 3:58.0. He had also competed frequently with success indoors, and so the early time of year for his antipodean venture was not an awkward one for him.

Sprinter Don Campbell and shot-putter Al Hershey were Fulton’s travelling companions, and they departed by air from San Francisco International Airport (already handling a million passengers a year) on 3 January for the 6500 miles (10,500 kilometres) flight to New Zealand. Fulton first met up with Harris in Auckland on 18 January, and it must have been a novel experience for the American because their race was a handicap 880 yards, with only himself and Harris running the full distance. Maybe this was why Fulton, unaccustomed to such arrangements, rushed into a 10-yard lead over Harris, weaving his way past the local runners who had started ahead, and was then passed by Harris with 220 yards to go. Harris failed by a yard-and-a-half to catch Jim Grierson, who had been given 15 yards leeway and won in 1:51⅗, which means that Harris must have been far inside his national record with a time which was estimated a shade generously as 1:51.8, and Fulton finished respectably, 20 yards behind. 

Their next meeting, again at 880 yards, was a week later in the town of Wanganui, on the west coast of North Island, and the race on the 330 yards Cook’s Gardens grass track – also in handicap form – was to be eloquently described in great detail by a New Zealand journalist, Norman Harris (no relation), who was one of the most impassioned of athletics writers, in his book, “Lap Of Honour”, published in 1963. The four runners given starts were soon caught and the time at the bell, 54 seconds, was precisely what Doug Harris had aimed for. His namesake then takes up the story:

“Now Fulton started coming at him. Harris saw the shadow in front of him accelerate. He moved with it and held it off. So it went on, no one in front and no sound of the footsteps behind. Just the shadow, surging, he drifting away from the surge, and each time the crowd roaring. At 220 yards from home he felt himself moving away. But the shadow came up again. Fulton‘s countryman, Al Hershey, had raced across and shouted, ‘Go now, Johnny !’ Fulton had heard, only Fulton. He got up behind Harris, clung all around the bend, and then coming off it he swung out to make his run. Now this was it. Harris saw him coming on the right, come level. Then he saw Fulton ahead by half a shoulder, no more … he couldn’t see the backs of his elbows. With only 20 yards to the tape Harris managed to close again. For one second they were together, over against the inside of the track. Their shoulders touched, bumped, and they swayed apart.

“Cook’s Gardens was a sound-shell of bedlam, the cheering making dust rise off the arc-lamps. Of the other runners, only McKenzie kept on in 3^rd place. The others had stopped, spellbound, to watch the finish. Harris, on the inside, was still moving with the same unfaltering stride. He gathered himself for the last thrust to the tape, just 10 yards away. Some force pulled him. He was through the tape, the ribbon fluttering away. Then he saw Fulton crashing down at his feet and he knew he had won. He completed a full circuit in front of the standing crowd while Fulton was lifted from the track by Hershey. Finally they met and rested on the shoulders of the starter, Benson, while the crowd still cheered. ‘That’s the fastest I’ve ever run’, gasped Fulton. ‘I don’t care what the time is’. A time of 1:49⅖. Harris had beaten his own official New Zealand record by three seconds and missed breaking Wooderson’s World record by only one-fifth of a second – one click of the stopwatch. When they measured the track they found it was more than 880 yards – it was two feet over the distance. Two feet less, one click less on each stopwatch, and that fifth of a second would have equalled the World record”. The previous fastest 880 yards anywhere by a New Zealander had been set at 1:51.2 by Vernon Patrick (“Pat”) Boot in winning the 1938 British Empire Games title in Sydney by a devastating margin. Tragically coincidental, Boot had died three days before the Harris-v-Fulton race at the age of only 32 while undergoing dental treatment. 

Almost exactly 15 years later, 27 January 1962, Doug Harris would return to Cook’s Gardens as one of the timekeepers for the World record 3:54.4 mile run by Peter Snell. Norman Harris wrote about that race, too, of course, in his book. “There are people here tonight who are more excited than they have ever been in their lives. In the city of Wanganui the streets will soon be thronged. It will once again be the night when Doug Harris won that great half-mile race”. Norman Harris, who died in 2015 at the age of 75, was only six years old at the time of the Wanganui race of 1947, and so his was not an eye-witness account, but how vividly he caught the mood of that memorable occasion ! After starting his journalistic career in the late 1950s he met Doug Harris and composed a sympathetic description in “Lap of Honour”:

“No one knew him. He spoke little and kept to himself. Many saw him as a self-disciplined Spartan. To some he was haughty, to others the lonely introvert. Douglas Harris was not a man who mixed socially, largely because of deafness. A live artillery shot in 1941 had left him with only faint hearing in his right ear. Conversation was a struggle when he missed most of what was said to him. He didn’t want the embarrassment, so he kept to himself and got the reputation for avoiding people. He just went along to the stadium to run. Little wonder that he was misunderstood, censured as often as he was exalted”. 

In 1945 he had requested transfer from the Auckland army pay-office to a remote rural base, and Norman Harris was to explain the reason: “He wanted the freedom from the needle matches and personal bickering of city athletics. At Waiouru he was to find that freedom. It was on the windy tussock plateau and in the mountain bush, striding along in a pair of shorts, impervious to the cold, that Harris was to find contentment and prepare himself as a champion. A strong-willed young man of 26, he walked for days through the hills, sleeping-bag and pup-tent strapped to his back, marvelling at the golden sand in the streams, the purple heather”. The Waiouru army base covers 870 square kilometres, and below-freezing temperatures have been recorded there in every month of the year, down to minus 11degF.

Douglas Mostyn Harris had been born on 15 June 1919 in the small South Island town of Leeston, near Canterbury, at a time when New Zealand had a population of less than 1.3 million. Brought up on his parents’ farm to an energetic open-air life, he was the second of three brothers, and he was educated at Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of North Island. There he won the 100 yards, 440 yards, 880 yards, three miles cross-country, high jump, long jump and hop step and jump at his district high school sports in 1937. By 1942, aged 22, he had achieved modestly promising times of 22.2 for 220 yards and 50.4 for the 440 but an 880 best of no more than 2:02.0. In 1943 he equalled the 440 national record of 48.8, held by an Olympic competitor, Stuart Black, since 1932, and then improved to 48.4 in 1944 and 47.8 in 1945. He was New Zealand champion in 1945 and at both 440 and 880 yards in 1946, showing marked potential at the latter distance with his best of 1:52.6, a domestic national record. He was also credited with 10.0 for 100 yards and 22.0 for 220 yards, and even an unverified 9.8 and 21.8. Norman Harris wrote: “He sought his record time with the most amazing physical equipment – a pulse rate of 39 after all his long walking and sprinting; a high level of haemoglobin in his blood; a lung capacity which enabled him to swim under water the length of a long pool; and, above all, his splendid running style, for which everyone who saw him used the same word, ‘Effortless’. It had been taught to him in Auckland by Tom McIntyre, who believed that “as man had learned to swim so he had to be taught how to run, with poise and balance, the head erect, the chest out, the knees lifted rhythmically”. McIntyre was a remarkably durable coach who had been a professional sprinter and accomplished rugby-football wing-threequarter at the beginning of the century and continued advising athletes until his death in the 1980s at the age of 98.  

Doug Harris built his own track in a hay-field by the army parade ground at Waiouru, cutting a three-feet wide circuit with a motor-mower and rolling it flat, and he achieved some remarkable times on his makeshift training terrain. “Every day, when Harris trained for time on the track, the quarter-master, John Beamish, was there holding a stop-watch”, Norman Harris wrote. “One week Harris did threequarter-mile trials in 3min 2sec and 3min 3sec. The next day he ran to the threequarter-mile mark again and then went round another lap. Beamish’s watch that day read 4min 8sec for the mile”. Tales are legion of fast times in training by middle-distance runners through the ages, and yet, though Doug Harris never raced a mile in organised competition, there seems no reason to doubt the QM’s timing or the subsequent reporting of it. Only 13 men had ever run a faster mile, and the 13^th was the most famous of NZ athletes, Jack Lovelock, with his 4:07.6 World record of 1933. The next best New Zealanders were Pat Boot, with 4:12.6 for 3^rdplace at the British Empire Games of 1938, and Randolph Rose, with 4:13.6 against the visiting American, Lloyd Hahn, in 1926.

Disappointingly, after the enthralling Harris-v-Fulton races of January 1947 nothing was ever to be quite the same for either of them again. Harris at least maintained his form for the rest of the New Zealand season, running another 1:52.6 half-mile on what was described as “a very rough track” in February and retaining his national 440 and 880 titles in March in 47.8, equalling his record, and 1:54.4. He then took up the offer of a physical education teachers’ course at Loughborough College, in England, happy in the knowledge that it would be beneficial long-term acclimatisation before the Olympics. Fulton meanwhile had pulled a muscle in another tour race on 29 January, and back in the USA and working in New York he told reporters that he hoped to find time for training, with the Olympics in mind,  but nothing was to be heard from him throughout the 1947 US season. The next reference to Harris, having arrived at Loughborough in October, was when he was already competing that month in the college freshmen’s sports and winning the 440 in 50.8, but he couldn’t have been over-impressed by the athleticism of his fellow first-year students – other track events from 100 yards to three miles were won in 10.5, 24.7, 2:06.3, 5:01.0 and 16:08.0. 

Into Olympic year some further glimpse of Games candidature was eventually to be shown by both Harris and Fulton. Harris started modestly enough, winning the British universities’ 440 yards title in 49.7 on 22 May at Motspur Park, in Surrey, and he may have noted, pointedly, that this was the same track on which Sydney Wooderson had set his 880 yards World record in 1938 (and his mile record of 4:06.4 the previous year). The next weekend Harris was in Iceland as one of a trio adventurously sent there by the Amateur Athletic Association and won a 400 metres on the volcanic ash track in Reykjavik in 49.4. He at last had some serious competition in the English AAA Championships on 2 July and led into the home straight in the 880 yards final, only to be passed by John Parlett, politely described in sections of the British press as “one of our lesser-known men”, who won in 1:52.2. Arthur Wint, Jamaican-born but resident in England and an established Great Britain international, was 3^rd. David Thurlow, who was to become one of the most respected of athletics writers and historians, was to recall in a comprehensive analysis of Parlett’s career for an issue of the UK history and statistics bulletin,, “Track Stats”, in 1995, “Many felt that Harris was not at his peak – ‘doing a Lovelock’ to be at his very best on the day of the Olympic final and so emulate the 1500 metres gold of his famous countryman 12 years previously”. In California in June John Fulton had run a useful enough 1:51.8 for the 880, but he wasn’t among the dozen selected for the 800 metres at the all-important US Olympic Trials, and that was the end of his hopes. That “sudden death” meeting, in which only the first three in each event qualified for the Games, and no exceptions were made, also marked the demise of the other American top-ranked half-miler of 1947, Tarver Perkins. Agonisingly, he was 4^th in the same time as the 3^rd-placed runner. 

So to the Olympic Games at Wembley, with the 800 metres heats on 30 July, semi-finals on 31 July and the final on 2 August. There were 41 competitors in total, of whom the USA, Canada, France, Greece (surprisingly), Great Britain and Turkey (equally surprisingly) each provided three; Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland two; Australia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Holland, Iceland, Jamaica, Korea, Luxemburg, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Spain and Trinidad one each. Marcel Hansenne (France) had run by far the fastest time leading up to the Games, 1:48.3 in June. Ingvar Bengtsson (Sweden) was next at 1:49.4 only nine days before the Games heats. The US trials race earlier in July had been won in 1:50.6 by Malvin Whitfield, who had been 2^nd to Johnny Fulton in the 1946 US championships. Two Danes, Niels Hølst-Sørensen and Herluf Christensen, had run 1:50.8 and 1:51.0 respectively. The second Swede, Olle Ljunggren, had also done 1:51.0. Hans Liljekvist would have been a a ready third Swedish selection, but he had been suspended briefly in the past for infringing the amateurism rules and was presumably left out of the team as a matter of diplomacy.

In 1947 form Doug Harris and Arthur Wint had to be taken into account, and so, logically, their AAA conqueror, John Parlett, came into the reckoning. Writing in “World Sports”, the highly informative and entertaining UK monthly magazine, the British team manager, Jack Crump, surmised, “This is the most open of the track events. Holst-Sørensen, Ljunggren and Hansenne I believe to be superior to America’s challengers. But I pin my faith on the Empire. Potentially, Wint is the choice, but on time, temperament and tactics I pick Harris. This fair-haired modest New Zealander has already made many friends in Britain. Just as the British contingent shouted for Jack Lovelock in that memorable 1500 metres in Berlin in 1936, so will many cheer for the black-vested Harris at Wembley”.

In the first-round heats, one of the Danes, Christensen, had the singular misfortune to fall and break his leg and in the confusion Harris was severely spiked. Crump gave a full account in “World Sports” of Harris’s Games experiences: “The spike wound seemed to have recovered by the day of the semi-final. Harris appeared to be running well and was certainly favourably placed when his left Achilles tendon broke, and he was carried from the arena on a stretcher. Harris’s athletics career has been one long struggle with misfortune. It has involved not merely long absences from the track but more than one spell in hospital”. One of the future stalwart members of the UK’s National Union of Track Statisticians, Stan Greenberg, was an enthralled teenage spectator at the Games, and he was to recall Harris clearly in “Track Stats” more than 50 years later: “Whitfield, Wint and Harris were regarded as the favourites for the gold, and I remember Wint and Harris coming round the bend on the first lap of the semi-final, and both of them running wide, with Harris three or four yards out. I was watching from the beginning of the back straight, and there was no staggered start in 800 metres races in those days, of course. Harris made a great impression on me. He was a beautiful runner to watch even by comparison with Wint, rugged but very smooth”. 

The nine finalists were Bengtsson, Hansenne, Holst-Sørensen, Parlett, Whitfield, Wint, together with Robert Chef d’Hotel (also France), Herb Barten and Bob Chambers (also USA). No detailed report of how the race was run needs to be given because this is readily available in numerous other sources, but the results are worth listing because of the form of automatic timing which was in use in addition to hand timing but not made public, giving the margins between the runners. No hand times were made known beyond 6^th place !

1 Whitfield 1:49.2 (1:49.3 automatic), 2 Wint 1:49.5 (+ 0.28), 3 Hansenne 1:49.8 (+ 0.78), 4 Barten 1:50.1 (+ 1.04), 5 Bengtsson 1:50.5 (+ 1.56), 6 Chambers 1:52.1 (+ 2.82), 7 Chef d’Hotel (+ 4.89), 8 Parlett (+ 6.97), 9 Holst-Sørensen (+ 7.06).    

The 8^th and 9^th runners were clearly far below form. Maybe the reasons were that Parlett had run by far a personal best of 1:50.9 in the previous day’s semi-final and suffered a reaction, and Holst-Sørensen had qualified in another of the three semi-finals only by the narrowest of margins from the Swede, Ljunggren. Parlett made full amends by achieving the remarkable feat in 1950 of winning the British Empire Games 880 yards in New Zealand in February, involving a round-the-world sea voyage and four months away from home, and the European Championships 800 metres in August. Holst-Sørensen retired from competition but would give a lifetime’s service to the Olympic movement before his death at the age of 100 in 2023.

Doug Harris spent months with his leg in plaster but was eventually able to resume training and made a comeback at the British universities’ championships in May of 1949, with no less an opponent than Arthur Wint, studying at London University. The editor of the UK’s “Athletics Weekly”, P.W. (“Jimmy”) Green, enthusiastically described Harris as “keepng within reasonable reach of Wint on the first lap, run in 55sec, moving up to the Jamaican at the bell, holding him along the back straight, and running him off his legs in the finishing straight to win in the record time of 1min 53.5sec”. Ominously, though, Green added that Harris had told him before the race that he was “just giving his injured leg a try-out to see if it would stand up to competition”. The long-term answer evidently was “No” because Harris missed the AAA Championships, and then returned home, his studies at Loughborough completed.

The British Empire Games in Auckland early in 1950 presented the obvious next challenge, but Harris managed only a handicap 300 yards and a 440 yards heat at the NZ championships in 48.8 by way of preparation. The Games 880 yards heats were on the opening day, 4 February, and the task for Harris seemed easy enough: eight starters, four to qualify for the final. The detailed report of the Games in “The New Zealand Sportsman” magazine told the story as succintly as could be wished for: “There was a near sensation in the first heat when New Zealand’s Olympic representative, D.M. Harris, withdrew after leading for a lap because of a pulled ligament. Harris was almost universally rated as the logical winner of the half and possibly the quarter, and his withdrawal from the half, and then the quarter, came as a major shock to his New Zeland supporters”. John Parlett won the 880 final for England in 1:53.1. Jamaica did not send a team, and so Arthut Wint was an absentee.

Doug Harris’s running career was over, and within a decade others were to become much more famous as Olympic champions, Peter Snell and Murray Halberg, under the tutelage of Arthur Lydiard. More than 50 years after Harris’s last fateful race a realistic assessment of his legacy, if any, was made in “Track Stats” by Peter Heidenstrom, author of a definitive history of New Zealand athletics and compiler of a catalogue of all Harris’s race, amounting to only 55 in eight years: “Since his career fizzled out quietly, Doug’s early years were soon forgotten. Poeple in the know would point him out as ‘that great runner’, but few realised in later years just how good he was. By then the Arthur Lydiard team was putting everyone else in the shade, past and present. After 1947 Doug never received the recognition he deserved”. 

Norman Harris, too, was to reflect in “Track Stats” in 2002, “Athletics was not a sport of major importance to New Zealanders when Doug was competing in the 1940s, and he certainly did not receive great attention by the press or the public as Snell’s predecessor. But the person I interviewed, and subsequently knew quite well, was an outgoing, confident and even dynamic character, especially as chairman of his athletics association”. Doug Harris died on 18 June 1996, three days after his 77^th birthday. That year 211 men throughout the World broke 1min 48sec for 800 metres and the leading New Zealander was ranked 75^th at 1:46.48. That certainly did not put him remotely in the class of Peter Snell … or, for that matter, Doug Harris.

Doug Harris had a weight of middle-distance running tradition behind him stretching back almost to the beginnings of organised athletics. In 1871 an English professional, Frank Hewitt, had run a startling 1:53½ for 880 yards on a partly downhill road course at Lyttelton, which is only, some 30 miles (50 kilometres) away from Harris’s birthplace. In 1906 Gregory Wheatley, who was Australian-born, was 4^th in the Olympic 1500 metres in Athens, and in 1910 he ran 880 yards in 1:56¾, which compared reasonably with the World’s fastest 800 metres of 1:52.8 by Mel Sheppard, of the USA, in winning at the 1908 Olympics. Dan Mason ran 4:18.0 for the mile while serving with the New Zealand army in Britain during and after World War I. J.W. Savidan – not even Norman Harris seemed sure whether his familiar first name was “John” or “Bill” – was three times national mile champîon before winning the  inaugural British Empire Games six miles in 1930. Then there were the achievements of Randolph Rose in the late 1920s and Pat Boot a decade afterwards. By comprison, Denmark could not provide their Olympic 800 metres finalist of 1948, of Niels Holst-Sørensen with any such forebears. 

Before him there had been only a single Danish World record-holder, Holger Henry Nielsen at 3000 metres in 1934, and Denmark’s two Olympic medals had been bronze at 400 metres in 1900 and silver in the pole vault in 1920. Their fastest 800 metres and 1500 metres men during the 1930s had run 1:54.2 and 3:58.1. Yet in 1943 they had two of the top three places in the understandably curtailed World rankings at 800 metres, as in a race in Stockholm on 28 August Holst-Sørensen won in 1:48.9, with Hans Liljekvist, of Sweden, 2^nd in 1:49.2, and another Dane, Gunnar Bergsten, 3^rdin 1:49.7. Of course, competition was limited in the midst of wartime, but even so there were still others from Finland, France, Hungary, Italy and the USA in the top 20 in the World that year. Of utmost significance, Holst-Sørensen’s time was the 4^th fastest ever. Only Rudolf Harbig, Germany’s World record-holder, and John Woodruff, the USA’s Olympic champion, had run faster than Holst-Sørensen since Sydney Wooderson had set his World records at 800 metres and 880 yards in 1938. The Danish record would stand until 1954 and Liljekvist’s Swedish record until 1953.

Holst-Sørensen’s progress as an athlete came about in unusual circumstances, to say the least. The German army had attacked his homeland on 9 April 1940 in violation of a non-agression treaty between the two countries, and within two hours the Danes had surrendered, hopelessly outnumbered. The King remained in residence and a Government was in office for the next three years in a situation of uneasy alliance with the invaders. Compared with other countries under Nazi rule, Denmark suffered lightly as only some 3,000 of its citizens died during the occupation, though in 1943 the Germans dissolved the Government, imposing martial law in retaliation for increasing resistance and acts of sabotage among the population. Yet when the Germans then attempted to round up the country’s Jewish population of 7,800 the obstructiveness and subterfuge of the general public was so effective that 7,220 were  kept in hiding or smuggled out of the country across the sea to safety in Sweden.

The Danish army had been allowed to maintain a token presence until then, and the previous year Holst-Sørensen had begun military training at the age of 18, having been born on 19 December 1922, the son of a dairyman. He was already an athlete of great promise as Danish record-holder at 400 metres, with 48.6 in Copenhagen on 24 September 1941. Athletics competition had continued more or less as normal as Gunnar Bergsten had run 1:53.9 for 800 metres at the same meeting and there were respectable performances across the full range of events during the year, as would be the case for the remainder of the war. This did not involve the prewar World record-holder, Holger Henry Nielsen, who had gone on to take the bronze medal for 10,000 metres behind two Finns at the inaugural 1934 European Championships, as he had later been suspended for infringing the amateur rules.  

In 1942 Holst-Sørensen beat Bergsten in an 800 meres race in Copenhagen on 23 August, 1:52.3 to 1:52.5, and there was another noteworthy mark from Harry Siefert at 10,000 metres, 30:55.4, and 30:26.8 by him the next year. Despite the war there was still plenty of track activity in Europe, with major races at 800 metres, for example, in Basle, Bologna, Budapest, Frankfurt-am-Main, Helsinki, Milan, Paris and, of course, throughout neutral Sweden. Standards in the event were understandably  depressed – but not by much. The leader was an American, Bill Lyda, from Oklahoma, who had won the NCAA (national collegiate) 880 yards in 1:50.8, which was a time only ever beaten in the meeting’s history by the 1936 Olympic champion, John Woodruff, and Campbell Kane, of Indiana University, was a close 2^nd to Lyda in 1:51.1. Mario Lanzi, of Italy, who had been a valiant rival of Harbig’s, ran 1:50.4 for 800 metres that year, and Harbig himself was timed in 1:51.9 in one of his last races before being killed in action in 1944.

Denmark and Sweden even held two international matches during 1943 – in Copenhagen on 17-18 July and Stockholm on 28-29 August. At the first of these Holst-Sørensen broke his national record for the 800 by almost two seconds, winning in 1:50.4 from Sweden’s Hans Liljekvist, 1:51.2, and it was in the return encounter in Stockholm that these two and Gunnar Bergsten all beat 1:50. The two Danes also figured in a 4 x 400 metres relay team which won an intensely exciting race, 3:15.6 to 3:15.8. Arne Andersson took the 1500 metres at that meeting in 3:50.8, with a Dane, Aage Poulsen, a close 2^nd in 3:51.0. The previous weekend Sydney Wooderson had won a mile race for the Amateur Athletic Association  against the Royal Air Force and a combined Police/Civil Defence team at Imber Court, in Surrey, in 4:14.8, and had shown excellent form throughout the summer, with a best time of 4:11.5, but he would have to wait another two years before he was at liberty to meet up with Andersson. 

On the very same day that Holst-Sørensen was contributing to that relay win over the Swedes, his country’s government was being thrown out of office by the Nazi authorities. Yet despite the tyrannical restrictions imposed on the Danish populace during 1944 he still set national records of 48.4 and then 47.6 for 400 metres (the latter time was to stand for 27 years) and ran 1:51.2 for 800 metres. Seven of the top 10 at 800 metres in the World that year were from Sweden, plus Marcel Hansenne, of France, also at 1:51.2, and Bob Kelley, the AAU and NCAA winner in the USA with a best of 1:51.8. Wooderson managed only three track races but still ran a 4:12.8 mile in June in Manchester, which had suffered bombing throughout the war. The following month, in unthreatened Malmö, Arne Andersson improved the World record to 4:01.6.

In July of 1945, two months after the end of the war in Europe, Holst-Sørensen had yet another rousing encounter with his close rival, Liljekvist, at Hälsingborg, in Sweden, and won again as both ran 1:49.4. With many athletes still in uniform, this was a transitional year in international athletics and the only faster time than in the Hälsingborg race was a 1:49.3 by a Finn, Bertel Storskrubb, who also, incidentally, led the 400 metres hurdles rankings. Andersson and Wooderson met at a packed and enthralled White City Stadium, in London, in August, and Andersson won their mile race, 4:08.8 to 4:09.2. A month later the two renewed acquaintanceship in Gothenburg and the margin was exactly the same but the times far faster – Andersson 4:03.8, Wooderson his best ever 4:04.2. Hägg had improved the record to 4:01.3 in July.

Holst-Sørensen was able to resume his military career in peacetime and graduated from the army academy in 1946. It was obviously a privileged time for him because when he was interviewed over 60 years later he was to recall that “I was a state employee athlete”, and he benefited from the generosity of his army superiors by winning the 400 metres in 47.9 at the European Championships in Oslo and placing 2^nd at 800 metres in a thrilling mass finish – 1^st  Rune Gustafsson (Sweden) 1:51.0, 2^nd Holst-Sørensen 1:51.1, 3^rd Marcel Hansenne (France) 1:51.2, 4^th Olle Ljungren (Sweden) 1:51.4, 5^th Tom White (GB) 1:51.5. Gustafsson had lingered in the shadows of Hägg and Andersson during the war years, placing an almost unnoticed 2^nd in Andersson’s World-record mile of 1943, 4:02.6 to 4:04.2, but further proved his quality a week after earning his European title by equaling Harbig’s World 1000 metres record of 2:21.4. Holst-Sørensen’s team-mate, Gunnar Bergsten, had retired after a varied career which featured national records at 400 metres (prior to Holst-Sørensen), 1500 metres and the mile and six national titles, including the pentathlon in 1942, plus 2^nd place in the long jump in 1945 with a personal best 6.92. He had been born in Sweden, had been taken to Denmark at the age of five, and had only eventually become a Danish citizen as a 19-year-old in 1939.

The happy state of affairs regarding Holst-Sørensen’s training régime did not last long because he decided to give priority to his service duty ahead of his track ambitions and transferred to flight school in 1947, where he began learning how to pilot a Spitfire. “Whilst being trained as a pilot on a little island, Holst-Sørensen had no opportunity for practising running”, wrote Carl Ettrup, editor of the Copenhagen athletics magazine, “Idraetsbladet”, in a 1948 “World Sports” pre-Olympic article. “Gymnastics, however, kept him in condition and he started in as many races as he could manage, piloting his plane to the various venues”. He had won the Inter-Allies’ title in Berlin in a modest 1:53.7, which would surely have been much faster if Jamaica’s Arthur Wint, serving in the RAF and running 1:50.0 at the White City four days before, had been competing. Later in the year Holst-Sørensen was transferred to another airfield, ironically built by the German invaders, and paths in the surrounding woods provided an attractive training location. He very soon managed a 1:49.8 for 800 metres at a Sweden-v-Rest of Scandinavia match in Stockholm, beating yet another Swede, Ingvar Bengtsson. 

Coached in a system largely based on interval training by a Swede, Sven Lundgren, who had set a World record 1000 metres in 2:28.6 in 1922,  Holst-Sørensen maintained throughout the winter of 1947-48 his 1½ hours a day of gymnastics and running, despite 10 degrees of frost. He suffered injury problems, just as Doug Harris did, as Carl Ettrup explained: “He is a natural runner, but young athletes should beware taking him as a model for style. He runs carrying his body straight, almost as though he was in a sitting position, and throws his legs forward, appearing to pull the body towards the foot. This requires tremendous strength, and even Niels’s leg muscles have not always stood up to the strain, for he has on occasions suffered from pulled ligaments. Gradually, however, he has built up a style of his own – not exactly copy-book but nevertheless efficient, and he no longer over-strains his muscles”. Carl Ettrup posed the inevitable question in an athletics context, “Will Niels be the first Dane to bring home an Olympic gold medal ?”, and, ironically, despite his disappointing showing, these 1948 Games still remain by far Denmark’s most successful ever, with 20 medals (five gold, seven silver and eight bronze) in all sports, which must have given Ettrup much scope for celebration in a subsequent book about those Games which he wrote for the Danish public. The country’s Olympic Committee was later to admit with commendable candour, that “it should not be forgotten that the Danish athletes were in better physical shape than participants from many other countries which were more severely marked by the war”. 

Holst-Sørensen’s 800 metres legacy was soon to be ably maintained in Denmark by Gunnar Nielsen, whose first mark of note was 1:52.4 at the age of 21 in 1949. He would go on to place 4^th in the 1952 Olympic final, missing bronze by only 6/100ths of a second, and would eventually set a national record in 1954, equaling Mal Whitfield’s World 880 yards record of 1:48.6. In much more recent times the Kenyan-born Wilson Kipketer, who later moved to  Monaco, collected a host of titles and records indoors and out at 800 metres after taking Danish citizenship. 

Holst-Sørensen had joined the Royal Danish Air Force when it was formed in 1951 and progressed through the ranks to become a Major-General and Commander-in-Chief before his retirement in 1987, having also been for four years Denmark’s military adviser to NATO. He had become a member of the International Olympic Committee in 1977 and served diligently on various committees until he stood down in 2002. Maintaining his fitness with golf, orienteering, ski-ing and tennis as the years passed, he was still cycling beyond his 90^th birthday in 2012, and before his death at the age of 100 on 4 October 2023 he was one of the oldest surviving 1948 Olympians.    

What a man ! Across a span of 60 years he had been his country’s leading athlete, his country’s most senior air force officer and military spokesman, and his country’s Olympic representative. Few Olympians can have possibly led such a full and rounded sporting and public life.  

The all-time Top Ten at 800 metres: on the eve of the 1948 Olympics

Note: ° distance disputedly said to be five yards short; * 880 yards time less 0.7sec.