An Olympian Effort

When I was a young man I was an international runner who held world sprint records and won medals in the European Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games. You would be right in thinking that training, allied with natural ability, had something to do with this, but it was a book, bought when I was 13, that made it all possible. That book changed my life.

It all began in 1952, when I was 12 and won the Under-13 100 yards race at my school sports day. That victory gave me an identity – I was a sprinter. The year 1952 was an Olympic one and the newspapers were full of stories about the athletes who would go to Helsinki to represent Britain, including sprinters, most notably E. McDonald Bailey, a native of Trinidad, who was the current AAA 100 yards champion. Picture Post carried a double-page spread of him leaving the starting blocks. I cut it out and pasted it on to thick white paper, making my own poster of him. Other pictures (all of McDonald Bailey) followed and soon I had a gallery on my bedroom wall. On 21 July, I remember listening to his Olympic 100 metres Final on the BBC Home Service. He finished third and so won the Bronze medal and came back to Britain with his head held high; only Foxhunter, a horse, had won a Gold for Britain at the Games. The next summer, now aged 13, I didn’t add any new sprint successes to my previous year’s tally; my sprinting career was on hold. I still hung on to my (silently) self-declared identity as a sprinter, though no one else would have recognized it; my home town had no running track, and so no athletics club or coach. My school was three bus rides away, and there was no running track there either. It took about an hour and a quarter for me to get to school each day. I left the house at about 7.45 but seldom managed to scramble downstairs much before 7.30, gobbled some breakfast and was gone. One morning in June I rushed downstairs and said to my mother, ‘I had a dream last night.’ ‘Oh?’ came the reply. ‘Yes, I dreamt that Choir Boy will win the National Hunt Cup,’ I said, and with that I left. At the end of the week, when I normally got my half-crown pocket money before going to school, my mother handed me £1 7s 6d, eleven times what I expected. ‘Choir Boy’, she said, ‘won at 10 to 1.’ ‘10 to 1?’ I asked, bemused. ‘Yes, you get ten times your bet, and you get your original stake back,’ . . . and with that, it was again time to go and catch the first of my buses. My mother had put my pocket money on a horse? That would probably be a surprising, perhaps even shocking, event in most families, but in mine it was extraordinary. We were Quakers. We didn’t gamble, we didn’t go to the races, we didn’t even talk about racing or racehorses. And, incidentally, we didn’t drink or swear. I was stunned. How had she done it? There were no betting shops on the high street then, only grey-looking men on street corners, in cloth caps, with a cigarette hanging from their lower lip; surely my mother hadn’t handed my half-crown to one of them? Most unsettling of all, though, was how had I known which horse was going to win? I still don’t know the answer and, sad to report, it never happened again. However, I now had money in my hand. With it I went to W. H. Smith’s and bought a book that I knew was sitting on its shelves – If It’s Speed You’re After by E. McDonald Bailey. Published that year, it was pocket-sized, with photographs and comical line drawings, and a foreword by Philip Noel-Baker, an Olympic medallist, a prominent politician and a Quaker, and it cost 6 shillings. I took it home and devoured every word of it. On line three of the first page McDonald Bailey gets down to basics:

I hope I may encourage you to take up the hard work that goes to make a top-class athlete, and if you don’t reach Olympic standard you may well become the fastest runner in your club, or in your town, or in your county. I said something about hard work. Don’t let that scare you, but I cannot emphasise too soon or too strongly that only by hard work can you hope to reach, or even to approach, the top. Rigid self-discipline, a willingness to learn, a determination not to be discouraged by early setbacks – these are the prerequisites of success as a sprinter, or of anything else, come to think of it.

This was all very well, but with no coach, no club and no track, how was I to follow his advice? At that stage in my life I had not even seen a running track, except in pictures. It was now the middle of June. A month later school finished for the summer holidays. On the last day, and after the last lesson, we lined up alongside our desks waiting to be dismissed. My classroom was on the first floor of a Victorian building known as The Towers. Large sash windows at the back opened on to a fire escape. As the others surged forward, eager to go, I quietly made my way to the back of the room and undid the lock on one of the sash windows. I then followed the rest of the boys out and caught the first of my buses home. After a few days hanging around the house, I packed my shorts, vest and pumps into a bag, slipped If It’s Speed You’re After into my pocket, and set off for school. Once through the gates, I quickly made my way to the back of The Towers, climbed the fire escape and, finding the window unlocked as I had left it, climbed in. The main school building was some distance away and screened by shrubs, so no one saw my arrival or my climb back down the fire escape, now changed into shorts and vest and clutching my book. No one saw me go down to the playing fields and place my book on the grass, open it at the chosen page and start to train. I never told anyone where I went or what I did that summer, not until decades later. But the following year I won all my races, and within five years I had broken every British sprint record. I had acquired a coach and a club, and a running track had been built near my school. And at the age of 20 I came home from the Rome Olympics with a Bronze medal for the 100 metres, just as McDonald Bailey had done. It would be easy to dismiss If It’s Speed You’re After as a mere ‘how to’ book, but books are often not about what they tell you to do, but about what they make you think. McDonald Bailey wrote about training, diet and injuries, but also about attitudes of mind, and the relationship between the crowd and the performer. He also asked awkward questions such as ‘What is sportsmanship?’ He even attempted to face head-on the issue of black sprinters’ success. ‘Have you ever wondered’, he wrote, ‘why coloured athletes excel . . . particularly in sprinting?’ In trying to answer that question he looked at racial differences in patella tendon reflexes, the length of tendons in the heel, heredity, history and sunshine. ‘Perhaps even white athletes’, he concluded, ‘with sunshine in their bones can match the speed of the negro sprinter.’ I read with fascination that he wanted to see an end to such typical remarks of the time as ‘Oh, he’s bound to win – he’s a darkie,’ partly because it was not always true, and partly because it was bad psychologically for white sprinters. There was certainly a lot to think about here for a boy of 13, and it has kept me thinking ever since. If It’s Speed You’re After still sits on my bookshelves sixty-five years after its first appearance there. Small, slim and modest, it has joined that magical circle of books that have been there so long they seem now to radiate their messages without even having to be opened. Work hard, be willing to learn, and don’t be put off by apparently overwhelming odds, it says. But it also carries reminders of a schoolboy’s dream, and of a young Queen. The horse that won me the money to buy the book was owned by Her Majesty and won for her, and for me, and against the odds, only a few days after her coronation. This is almost the first time I have told this story – almost but not quite. I have told the Queen.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Peter Radford 2019