The glory days of middle distance running at the Morton Stadium in Dublin will be revisited next Wednesday evening (in memory at least) to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Billy Morton's death - arguably Ireland's greatest athletics guru.
And while most of the country's top distance runners will compete in the memorial Morton Mile, it will be hard to recreate the atmosphere that once filled the stadium under the ambitious promotions of Morton himself. Past winners of this race include Eamonn Coghlan, John Walker and Steve Scott but you have to go back to August 1958 to find the time when Morton made Dublin one of the centres of world athletics.
On that occasion, it seemed half the city showed up to see Herb Elliot of Australia break the world mile record on the Santry cinders with a time of three minutes 54.5 seconds and finish well ahead of our own Olympic champion Ronnie Delaney. One of the ways Morton managed to convince Elliot to travel to Dublin was by claiming it was the fastest track in Europe due to the extra large quantities of oxygen exuded from the trees on the edge of the stadium. Now that's the sort of imagination which is sadly lacking in Irish athletics at the moment.
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