“Occasionally,” Ron Delany once argued, “spectators are missing the point by turning their attention too often to the clock. The record. It’s not ‘How fast is he going to run?’ To me, it’s ‘What is he going to win?’”
Delany, who died last week at 91, won scores of races, the most memorable being the 1956 Olympic 1500 meters when he was 21 years old, establishing him as a sort of track-and-field St. Patrick in his native Ireland, an inspiration to his economically struggling homeland. He was a celebrity there the rest of his life.
He had come to America from Dublin at 19, in 1954, on a track scholarship to Villanova University outside Philadelphia, where his racing dominance opened a pipeline of Irish middle-distance champs to the school—future Olympians Eamonn Coghlan, Marcus O’Sullivan, Sonia O’Sullivan (no relation) among them.
How fast did Delany run? It’s an unavoidable question in a sport devoted to the stopwatch, all those competitions that conclude with a huddle of officials, stopwatches poised in outstretched hands, crouching at the finishing tape to record the minutes and seconds (and splits of a second) expended.
That tableau is so common that it was the source of a whimsical report proposed by an editor at Long Island’s Newsday sometime before I was employed there—just so that editor could play on Thomas Paine’s eloquent 1776 observation during the Revolutionary War’s darkest hour, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
That editor’s punning headline, introducing those clock-watchers: “These are the souls that time men’s tries.”
Yes, and the late Paul Zimmerman, for years the New York Post’s elite track reporter, packed his own stopwatch to meets to time not only the runners but also the length of National Anthems played before those events. Track fans, too, typically engage in appraising athletes’ velocity, something Delany had “found extremely hard to take” during his career. He was booed fairly often while winning in less-than-record time. There were tales of track meet patrons tossing beer cups at him during races at New York’s Madison Square Garden for not setting a faster pace.
He addressed this matter in 1996 during a chat before a Garden celebration of past stars of the Millrose Games’ famous Wanamaker Mile—which Delany won four consecutive years in the late 1950s. At 60, always a hardcore track afficionado himself, he zeroed in on the essence of the 1992 Olympic 1500 final, which had been played out at what was described as “a shockingly slow pace”—slower than the women’s Olympic final had been that year.
“But what! A! Race!” Delany enthused. “Tense, tactical race! “Noureddine Morceli [the favorite from Algeria] got trapped in the pack on the final backstretch—and [Spain’s] Fermin Cacho burst from the pack and won!”
“That’s the beauty of sport, races like that,” he said. “Your emotions rise at times like that. I confess that I sometimes cry when I see the beauty of sport. Sometimes, in a subliminal dream, I train again. I race again. Of course, I win again. Then I wake up.
“Of course,” he then confided, “I quietly noted, ‘Geez, I could’ve won that race!’ If they’re running 3:31, no way. But if they’re going to dawdle for three laps, I could kick ass.” Cacho had run 3:40.12—“pretty slow,” confirmed Delany who, 40 years earlier, also burst from the pack—10th place with a lap to go—to take his Olympic gold in 3:41.2.
His triumph had come two years after England’s Roger Bannister was the first human to run the mile in under four minutes, a feat then compared to Edmund Hillary and guide Tensing Norgay conquering Mount Everest. Bannister, and the next nine men to break the four-minute mark after him, all were in Melbourne, Australia, for Delany’s ’56 Olympic 1500 meter victory.
Talk about running fast. Four members of the exclusive sub-four club were in the stands: Bannister, Australian Jim Bailey and Englishmen Chris Chataway and Derek Ibbotson. On the track were Delany, Australian John Landy, England’s Brian Hewson, Hungary’s Laszlo Tabori and Denmark’s Gunnar Nielsen. (Landy finished third that day, Tabori fourth, Hewson fifth, Nielsen 10th. Hungarian Istvan Rozsavolgyi, the tenth sub-four man, had been eliminated in the Olympic semifinals.)
Throughout his post-running career, Delany remained a hero in Ireland, where he was a marketing consultant, member of the Irish sports council and Irish tourism council and worked with third-world charities. He was recognized wherever he went.
“I had one little guy,” Delany said during that 1996 discussion, “come up to me in Dublin and say, ‘Are you Ron Delany?’ I confessed that I was, expecting some sort of compliment. He said to me, in that very Irish way, ‘I never saw anyone who got so much mileage out of winning a bloody medal.’”
So, it indeed was about the medal. Not the time. “That’s the point,” Delany said. “I don’t have to explain that I ran the Olympic 1500 in such-and-such a time. The time is an irrelevancy. I won the Olympics.”
