Rewatching old videos of the 1956 Olympic 1,500m on Wednesday, after news of Ron Delany’s death broke, I was struck again by how cool he stayed under pressure and how late he left his finishing kick.
He was nowhere at the bell, and still 10th of 12 runners with 300m to go. Then he started gliding through the traffic, although it wasn’t until the final bend he attracted the attention of the newsreel commentator, who had been concentrating on Australian favourite John Landy.
“Look! That man in the green shirt – where did he come from?” asked the voiceover. “It’s the Irish miler Ron Delany. He’s flying now. Fourth. Third. Second now. He’s actually sprinting. He doesn’t seem tired in the least bit. He’s coming on like an express train.”
And sure enough, Delany didn’t stop until the finish line. The complete contrast, meanwhile, was British runner Brian Hewson, who had led too soon and, tying up, went from first to fifth in the last 100m.
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Landy came late to finish third, but as I had to be reminded on Wednesday, it was the forgotten Klaus Richtzenhain who won silver and left a curious footnote in the history books.
Richtzenhain was the only medallist in Melbourne for the United Team of Germany, a postwar federation of Olympic bodies representing not just East and West but also a third entity, the French protectorate of Saarland, which would join West Germany a year later.
I filed that obscure detail away for possible future reference. When you write a daily column and do table quizzes, you never know when such useless information might come in handy.
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Kilkenny reader Denis Bergin reminds me of a period Delany spent in that city during the 1950s, selling vacuum cleaners door to door.
It was to the despair of his father, who wanted him to do an Army cadetship instead. But Delany’s time in Kilkenny was not wasted and may have had a formative influence in helping him stay cool under pressure.
I say this because Bergin’s knowledge of the time is inherited from a man named Tom McDonald, who also moved to Kilkenny in the 1950s, to sell and service refrigerators. He died in 2013, but not before recording his memories of Delany for a local history project.
Like many newly arrived visitors, they both stayed in Coogan’s of James’s Street, “the best eating house in Kilkenny” then, which also offered accommodation for 12. And as well as being his host, Coogan’s was one of McDonald’s first customers, buying a large fridge and getting him to put a strong lock on it to prevent hungry male lodgers raiding it at night.
Under pressure from some of said lodgers, however, when coming in late, McDonald sometimes had to open the fridge by unscrewing the door hinges – there were three of them, with nine screws each – to liberate food. Delany probably never benefited: he was always “in bed with a glass of Lucozade by 9pm”.
But according to McDonald, Delany’s bed was sometimes refrigerated too. This is because he liked to use an aluminium hot water bottle on cold nights. The other lads, for laughs, liked to put that in the deep freeze when he was out, so it would be “about minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit” on his return.
McDonald gave Delany lifts home to Dublin at weekends. And on one such occasion, despite all the refrigeration expertise around him, the runner came close to losing his cool.
He was due to compete at the Trinity College races, but the pair were delayed first by a job at a butcher’s shop in Athy and then by traffic. On the last approach to Trinity, Delany had to get out and run. “He never stopped running that day” either, McDonald recalled.
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At the annual Dublin Rape Crisis Centre corporate table quiz on Thursday night, it seemed for a while as if The Irish Times team had gone off too fast. We scored 10 out of 10 in each of the first two rounds, and by halfway were a dizzying three points ahead of perennial winners Irish Life, with the rest of the 46-strong field strung out behind.
Irish Life have pipped us on many occasions, leaving only the consolation that at least our pensions were in good hands. But this year, as we started to tie up and with the insurance company breathing down our necks, another threat emerged. When the final scores were totted, we found ourselves in a tie break with Newstalk.
Then, before you could say, “Look! That man in the green shirt! Where did he come from?”, quiz master Pat Kenny sprang the tie-break question: To the nearest tenth of a second, what was Ronnie Delany’s winning time in the Olympic 1,500m?
From somewhere amid a fog of useless detail about the postwar history of French-occupied Saarland, I remembered the news clip commentator saying it was 3.41.2. With that, the quiz was over. Thanks to Ronnie, we finished like an express train.
