How Ronnie Delany’s golden moment dawned slowly in Ireland

My dad still tells the story of waking up on the dark morning of December 1st, 1956, at about 7am, maybe earlier, racing downstairs and straightaway turning the dial on the radio to BBC World Service. This was the only connection to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 11 hours ahead and some 11,000 miles away.

Six months earlier, he’d won the Irish Schools senior mile, running for Tralee CBS, and Ronnie Delany was already one of his heroes. The radio reception occasionally broke down and there was no mention of Delany at all – until he is suddenly “eating up the ground” and on his way to the 1,500m gold medal.

With that, he runs up to St John’s Church in Tralee, waits outside Saturday morning mass, and tells anyone who would listen that Ronnie Delany has won the Olympics. A year later, he follows Delany on the US Scholarship path, attending Idaho State University, and later still runs in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

Most people of that vintage can also tell you exactly where they were on that morning 60 years ago – including Tony O'Donoghue, the veteran RTÉ athletics commentator¨ and author of Irish Championship Athletics, who subsequently reported on 11 Olympics.

BBC radio

“I was 19, already a track and field nerd,” O’Donoghue tells me. “Like that, it was early morning, and I was downstairs at home in Mount Merrion in Dublin, tuned into BBC radio. I’d added interest as well in that Fionnbar Callanan and I had written some stuff at the time, predicting that Delany had a chance of winning, so it was important for me to hear the race.

“BBC live service were doing extensive Olympic coverage from Melbourne, and I remember listening to Rex Alston, one of their main sports commentators at the time, not just in athletics. And it’s true that Delany hardly got a mention at all during the race, until the very end.

“Certainly the Alston commentary I remember was focusing on the three British runners, especially Brian Hewson, who was fancied to win, and John Landy, the Australian. There was no RTÉ at the time, which didn’t come on air until December 1961, and the old Radio Éireann wouldn’t have done it either.

"So, other than that, the news broke mostly by word-of-mouth. There were three evening papers at that stage, as well, the Dublin Evening Mail, the Evening Press, and the Evening Herald, and they would have carried something.

"The interesting thing is the Sunday Press also went quite big on it the following day, with an 'eyewitness' report attributed to Tom Stanaway, who was the pseudonym or alias Irish name for any story pulled off the agencies or cobbled together from the wires. There was no such person as Tom Stanaway.

Lots of pictures

"A few weeks later Sports Illustrated ran a big story on Delany, given the Irish connection, with lots of pictures, and also Track & Field News, and there would have been a few Reuters's pictures at the time. The funny thing is The Irish Times Book of the Century reports the race as December 2nd, given it didn't appear in The Irish Times until the Monday, the 3rd.

“But it was much later, years I’d say, before I ever saw TV or video footage. There was news footage in cinemas at the time, Pathé News or Movietone, but I don’t ever remember seeing Delany’s race that way. And I would have gone to the cinema quite a bit at the time.”

The BBC may have had shown some race footage, but TV sets in Ireland in 1956 were an absolute rarity: still, there was no denying the impact of Delany’s success – not just on Irish sport but on the country as a whole.

“It was considered a great surprise,” adds O’Donoghue, “and it’s worth recalling that Delany very nearly wasn’t selected for Melbourne. But it was certainly huge news at the time. It felt like we’d arrived on the world sporting stage, because you have to think what it was like then. We were a poorer country, much more a backwater than we are now, and the very fact someone could win on the world stage certainly gave people a lift.

“And I actually don’t think it would have the same impact today, given all our distractions.”