Ron Clarke, the Australian distance running champion who died last week aged 78, was a colossus of the track in the 1960s. However, his superstardom and phenomenal gift for breaking records was overshadowed by his lack of success at Olympic level. David Saunders reports.
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For all his phenomenal success and achievements as one of the greatest distance runners of all time, two of the most enduring images of Ron Clarke involve him falling over.
On the first occasion, in 1956 during the Australian Mile championship in Clarke’s home town of Melbourne, he tumbled after another runner clipped his feet and sent him sprawling. Other runners came over the top of him including fellow Australian track legend John Landy, whose spikes grazed Clarke’s shoulder.
Landy stopped, apologized, and helped Clarke to his feet, before setting off to catch the pack some 40 meters ahead. He caught them up and subsequently won a race that has become part of Australian sporting folklore. It was a moment of sportsmanship from a bygone era that has since been captured in a bronze statue of Landy and Clarke, which stands outside the site of the old running track in Melbourne.
The second fall was altogether more serious. In 1968, Clarke was competing in the 10,000 meter event at Mexico City, his second Olympic Games. Despite months of high altitude training to acclimatize, Clarke found the conditions on the track debilitating and never challenged for the lead. After finishing, he collapsed on the track and nearly died from altitude sickness, suffering permanent damage to his heart.
Near death experience in Mexico City
For the rest of his life, Clarke remained adamant that the Games should never have been held at a high altitude location like Mexico City; not only was it detrimental to the health of athletes as his own experience had demonstrated, but it was unfair on the majority of runners in distance events who were used to conditions at sea level.
Clarke did, however, maintain a sense of humor about his near death experience. Recounting how the Australian team doctor had to jump a moat and fight off police to get to him on the track and treat him, Clarke said: “it was lucky I took so long on the last lap or he would never have made it”.
Ronald William Clarke, who died aged 78 on 17 June after a short illness, was the accidental track hero. He only started taking running seriously after injuring a finger playing Australian Rules Football, a game at which his father and elder brother Jack had played at the highest level for the Essendon Bombers.
A stint of compulsory military service and four years of studying accountancy in his early 20s also conspired against any continuity early in his running career.
Nonetheless, Clarke went on to break 17 world records – a feat matched only by Finland’s Paavo Nurmi – over distances ranging from 2 miles to 20 kilometers, in a career which put him among the greatest distance runners of his, or any, era. He was not only an Australian hero, but also an internationally admired, and feared, competitor.
After retiring from competitive running, he had a successful business career, authored several books mostly about running, and served eight years as mayor of the Queensland resort town of Gold Coast. He resigned from that post to make an unsuccessful run for Queensland’s state parliament. In recognition of not only his success as an athlete but also his contribution to public life, Clarke was made both a Member of the British Empire (MBE) and an Officer of the Order of Australia.
Clarke first came to the public’s attention as a 19-year-old when he carried the Olympic torch at the opening ceremony of the 1956 summer games in Melbourne. The grainy newsreel footage shows him running around the Melbourne Cricket Ground as sparks from the torch drips all over his arm. With holes in his shirt and blistering on his arms, he didn’t realize he’d been burnt until an ambulance attendant bandaged him up after the flame had been lit.
His duties completed, Clarke then caught public transport back to his uncle’s house to watch the rest of the opening ceremony, because officials hadn’t been given him a seat at the stadium. They did things differently then.
A gilded age of Australian sport
Tall, tanned and handsome, with a classic upright running style, Clarke was part of a gilded age of Australian sport – the embodiment of the bronzed Aussie ideal that strutted the world sporting stage in the 1950s and 60s. He rolled off an apparent production line of wholesome world-beaters from Down Under, including Landy and champion miler Herb Elliott, and those in other sports including swimmers Dawn Fraser, John Konrads and Murray Rose and tennis players Rod Laver, Roy Emerson and Ashley Cooper.
Whilst most of those contemporaries boasted records of almost unremitting triumph (Elliott, for instance, retired unbeaten at the top level), Clarke’s legacy is less clear cut. A bold front runner, a gambler, Clarke could be imperious on the track, effortlessly demolishing rivals as he set new benchmarks across an impressive range of distances. At one point he held the record for every distance from 2 miles to 20 kilometers.
In 1965, at the height of his career, Clarke rampaged across Europe, breaking 12 world records in 44 days. During that period he broke the 10,000 meter record three times, slashing 39 seconds off the time in the process. He also lopped 18 seconds off the 5,000 meter record, lowering it on four separate occasions.
That same year, the British Broadcasting Corporation named him its Sportsman of the Year in the overseas personality category while the International Association of Sports Writers also crowned him Sportsman of the Year.
Lack of Olympic success
And yet, as his record shows, form deserted him at the big meets. As Australian sportswriter Peter FitzSimons put it last week in his Sydney Morning Herald column, Clarke’s career was a blend of peaks that stood out “like the Himalayas” and troughs that coincided with major championship races. His Olympic medal haul from two games – a bronze in the 10,000 meters at Tokyo, accompanying the four silver from three Commonwealth Games between 1962 and 1970 – doesn’t do justice to his prodigious talent and consistent achievements elsewhere.
His criticism of Mexico City as an Olympic venue aside, Clarke was self-effacing and not one to wallow in his misfortune. Outwardly, his lack of Olympic success didn’t appear to bother him, any more than setting world records excited him.
He was an archetypal laconic Australian hero who kept things in perspective and never took himself too seriously. But his laid back approach and sense of decency covered a steely determination that enabled him to destroy his opponents seemingly at will.
His first world record in 1963 – or rather the way he went about it – encapsulates that intriguing blend of traits. At Melbourne’s Olympic Park, Clarke had lined up for the Emil Zatopek 10,000, an annual race meeting named in honor of the great Czech runner.
Clarke started the race hoping to break the six mile record at the Zatopek and did so with ease, lapping many of his rivals along the way. That goal achieved, Clarke slowed to a jog, intending to cruise through the final lap of the 10,000 meter event, his goal achieved.
From the crowd, he heard a friend’s voice calling out to him to go for the 10,000 meter record as well. So he did.
“It suddenly just electrified me,” he told British journalist Barry Davies in a 1986 interview. “I didn’t even think, I just took off.” Needless to say, he broke the 10,000 record as well as the six-mile mark.
A ‘runner’s runner’
It seems incredible now, where assaults on such milestones are planned for months and pacemakers employed to maximize the record chaser’s chances of success, that a distance runner could start a race with no such preconceived plan, break a record and end up with not one, but two, world marks.
Clarke was a runner’s runner. He ran to better his own marks, which on many occasions just happened to be world records, rather than fixating on medals.
Did he lack the killer instinct? Was he not sufficiently single-minded, mean even, to triumph when the heat was on? Was he too nice?
Some even suggested the incident when Landy picked him up cursed him with a exaggerated sense of chivalry that curtailed his ruthless streak. It’s a strange conclusion to draw about a guy who was famous for running from the front, and who tore up record books like they were tissue paper. Clarke himself dismissed such notions.
“That is just absolute, absolute rubbish,” he told FitzSimons in an interview. “I hate that whole notion that you have to be mean, and have the ‘killer instinct’, and so forth, to be a really good sportsman. I think it does an enormous amount of damage. Sport was never meant to be like that.”
Zatopek’s gift
While he might have had some detractors, he also had high caliber admirers. In an article on Clarke on the Runner’s Tribe website last week, Australian athletics writer Len Johnson quoted 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist Frank Shorter, who said:
“Ron Clarke was my idol. I grew up seeing Ron Clarke in the dark blue singlet with the V on it – to me that was the symbol of running.”
In 1968, Zatopek invited Clarke to run in Prague. As Zatopek farewelled him at the airport, he slipped a small package into Clarke’s hand, saying simply “you deserve this”. Clarke was perplexed. Bearing in mind this was at the height of the Cold War and he was behind the iron curtain, he wondered what the great champion could want to give him.
As he flew back to London Clarke’s curiosity got the better of him and he opened the package. Inside was Zatopek’s Olympic gold medal for the 10,000 meters at Helsinki in 1952. Zatopek had written to Clarke: “Not out of friendship, but because you deserve it”.
Sometimes elite athletes, for whatever reason, fail to achieve the glory that people expected of them. Some are haunted by it for the rest of their lives. Others just deal with it and get on with life, comfortable with the fact that their records speak for themselves. Ron Clarke was one of them: a true champion from another era.
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Photo Credit: AAP/File
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Ron CLARKE was a significant childhood hero of mine and all the more so DESPITE not winning a single Olympic gold medal. He taught me that true greatness has nothing to do with the medals or other hardware.