How Ronnie Delany’s date with Olympic destiny inspired a generation of Irish athletes

It doesn’t feel that long ago since Ronnie Delany was telling me the difference between his fate and faith, and how these conspired into something we might all call our destiny.

Fate, for Delany, was when you got the sense you knew something about yourself that no one else did. Which in his case meant winning an Olympic gold medal.

He certainly seemed to know this about himself from a relatively young age or well before anyone else did. It then required considerable faith to see it through, at age 21, on his first appearance on the biggest sporting stage of all.

There were ample reminders of this when rereading some interviews with Delany following his death on Wednesday at the age of 91. Because perhaps more than anything else, Delany had this extraordinary sense of his own destiny, chasing after it with unbreakable resolve as if nothing whatsoever was going to stop him from fulfilling it.

During one interview with this writer in 2006, marking the 50th anniversary of his gold medal run in the Olympic 1,500 metres in Melbourne in 1956, Delany recalled his journey as if everything were laid on exactly according to a higher plan. Even if his selection for Melbourne was only confirmed at the last moment.

[ Ronnie Delany’s Olympic gold medal lifted a nation, but he almost didn’t make it ]

“I think it was a split vote in the end,” he said. “But the only horror about it is thinking back now about what would have happened if I hadn’t been sent. I think at that stage I did feel an element of destiny. There had to be. There was no moment in Melbourne when I didn’t believe I was going to win.”

In his memoir Staying the Distance, also published in 2006, Delany wrote about his decision to abandon the Irish Army Cadet School and ultimately pursue a running scholarship at Villanova University, just outside Pennsylvania. Suffice to say, there’s no way Delany would have succeeded in Melbourne without making that move.

No one was pushing or pulling him in either direction; he simply knew what he had to do. “I had to make a decision. Abandon my ambition to be an athlete or resign from the Cadet School. I opted for the latter, such was my conviction that I was destined to be a great athlete.”

In another interview in 2016, marking the 60th anniversary of his Melbourne triumph, he touched on another element of fate in that “you play your own part in it too. Like me leaving the Irish Army Cadets, at age 18, to the aghast of my father, to chase the US scholarship. And how I was able to apply myself to the training, understood the quantum I needed to do”.

Delany’s moment of fate in Melbourne was then crowned by his own faith, when he fell to his knees in prayer.

“I can’t remember what I said. I just knew I was in connection with the greater being out here. And that is sort of scary ... but religion was huge for me.”

And if Delany hadn’t succeeded in Melbourne? “I don’t do maybes, but it is terrifying to think about my life if I hadn’t won. I can’t actually conceive it.”

What is equally terrifying is the thought of what might have happened to the next generation of Irish distance runners, a great many of whom were inspired and influenced by Delany to pursue running scholarships across the United States. In that sense, Delany’s success in Melbourne occupies the single most pivotal turning point in the long history of athletics.

A trio of Irish athletes, Jimmy Reardon, John Joe Barry and Cummin Clancy, had also attended Villanova, a few years before Delany, but for a variety of reasons never quite fulfilled their potential or perhaps destiny. The US pipeline, as it soon became known, might have dried up fast if it weren’t for Delany’s breakthrough.

Instead, within a few short years, he was inspiring young distance runners throughout the country. My dad often told me the story of waking up on the dark morning of December 1st, 1956, at about 7am, racing downstairs and turning the dial on the radio to BBC World Service. This was the only connection to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 11 hours ahead and 11,000 miles away.

Six months earlier, he’d won the Irish Schools senior mile, running for Tralee CBS, and Delany was already one of his heroes. A year later, he followed Delany on the US scholarship path, attending Idaho State University, before running in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. They later toured the New York indoor circuit together and remained lifelong friends, just like so many of Delany’s contemporaries did. Such was the running fellowship that Delany also inspired.

Eamonn Coghlan, John Treacy, and Sonia O’Sullivan also spoke this week about the inspiration they took from Delany, particularly in him using his US collegiate experience as a springboard to his international success. For many years part of the lament around Irish athletics was the lack of facilities or coaching support, when indeed going to college in the US was all about the exposure to top-class competition.

No Irish athlete has realised or embraced that with more profound results than Delany. Trace the trail of Irish distance-running success and he inspired a generation in other ways, too, helping to ignite a US indoor running tradition which later continued with World Indoor champions such as Marcus O’Sullivan and Frank O’Mara.

Even though Delany ran his last competitive race at 26, he never lost his connection with the generation of Irish athletes that followed. Whether they attended a US college or not, he also understood every distance runner can only follow their own different path.

Still, 70 years after his Melbourne success, Irish athletics is still waiting for its next Olympic gold medal winner. Maybe only destiny can take care of that.

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