In 2008, an updated version of a book entitled Faster Higher Stronger traced the fortunes of Irish athletes that had competed at the Olympic Games.
Chapter five opens with a description of Ronnie Delany’s homecoming a few weeks after winning the 1,500m gold medal at the Melbourne Games in 1956.
Taken from pieces of programmes, photographs, memorabilia and magazine articles from 1950s editions of Sports Illustrated and Sports World, the chapter begins with words written in a margin at the top of a folded scrap of paper.
The short scribbles map out the slow journey of Delany’s return to Ireland through Shannon Airport, to Limerick and on to Dublin.
READ MORE
“Road speed 37mph,” says one note. It continues: “Limerick 10.00. Nenagh 10.30. Roscrea 11.10. Portlaoise 12.00. Kildare 12.35. Naas 2pm. Inchicore 2.40. O’Connell Bridge 3pm.”
In other places, brief descriptions of what takes place at various locations are logged. With an eye on posterity and the unfolding significance of a historic event, there’s an understanding of the place in Irish sporting history Delany would come to hold.
As the cavalcade advances towards Dublin and into Portlaoise, the description reads: “Completely mobbed. Hysterical crowd”.
At that stage in 1956, it was over a week after the Olympics had finished, with Delany finally arriving in Dublin in the late afternoon of December 19th, sitting on the back of a beautiful open-top Mercedes-Benz wearing a large-collared, white longcoat.
Although he was not the first Irish Olympic champion – Dr Pat O’Callaghan (1928 and 1932) and Bob Tisdall (1932) had won gold medals in the hammer throw and 400m hurdles respectively for the relatively new Irish state – Delany’s gold in the blue riband event seeped deep into the Irish consciousness of the time.
Social conservatism, mass immigration and little television in the country kept Ireland in the 1950s relatively inward-looking, especially in rural areas. What television there was in the country arrived via the BBC.
Telefís Éireann was not established until 1961, with the first broadcasts in December of that year. Radio, print media or simply gathering for events were the main ways people got their information.
And so, they turned out that winter, town by town, to witness the luminous 21-year-old Olympic champion.
Unknown to the people, who occasionally gridlocked the procession, was that Delany was close to not being selected for Melbourne by the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI).
An American runner from Kansas called Wes Santee may have been at least partly responsible for that.
Santee had been hotly tipped to become the first sub-four-minute miler before Roger Bannister achieved the magical mark on a cinder track in Oxford in 1954. But Santee had run a 1,500m world record of 3:42.8 in 1954 and set indoor records for 1,500m and the mile.
He had competed in the Helsinki Games in 1952 in the 1,500m, but prior to the 1956 Games drew the ire of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and was suspended over his amateur status.
Like many athletes of the time, Santee received expenses to which the AAU generally turned a blind eye. But he was a more abrasive character than most of the others and following a power flex by the AAU and several court cases in the US, he was banned from competing for life.
At that time, “amateur” meant different things to different people, with some officials taking a strict line on the interpretation and others open to supporting how the sport was changing. They took a more pragmatic stance on what was a vexed issue.
In Ireland, the OCI, a strictly amateur organisation, came to ratifying the Irish team to travel to Melbourne. Some of the officials, troubled by Delany’s status as a bursary student in Pennsylvania’s Villanova University – and therefore, by their conservative definition, a virtual professional – voted against sending him.
With Santee’s suspension still a talking point in the sport, almost half of the OCI voted against Delany being selected.
Had the committee been split on it, Lord Killanin, then president of the OCI, would have cast the deciding vote in favour of the Irish runner competing.
When he was later asked about the selection, Delany interpreted it as administrative befuddlement and confusion as athletics in Ireland then was governed by an alphabet soup of governing bodies, which were regularly in dispute and generating chaos.
At that time, there were also financial concerns within the OCI and funding the Olympic team was complicated. As the amateur ethos cut both ways, it operated under significant financial strain to cut costs.
Freddie Gilroy, a bantamweight boxer, and John Caldwell, a flyweight, both from Belfast, won bronze medals in Melbourne along with Tony ‘Socks’ Byrne, a lightweight from Drogheda. Dublin’s Fred Tiedt narrowly lost out in the welterweight final, bringing home silver.
Not until London 2012 would more individual Irish athletes win medals at an Olympic Games.
He almost didn’t make it, but in 1956, Delany captured the Olympic zeitgeist. Melbourne will always be remembered as the Games he won 1,500m gold in.
