The death has taken place of Ronnie Delany at the age of 91, the athlete indelibly associated with his Olympic 1,500m triumph in Melbourne in 1956 and to this day one of the greatest achievements in Irish sporting history.
Delany turned 91 only last Friday and died in Dublin on Wednesday afternoon after a short illness. He was at the time Ireland’s only third Olympic gold medal winner, after Pat O’Callaghan in the hammer (in 1928 and 1932) and Bob Tisdall in the 400m hurdles (also in 1932). Delany remains Ireland’s last Olympic gold medallist in athletics.
Coming in the blue riband event that is the 1,500m, Delany’s gold medal run in Melbourne at the age of 21 also made him a worldwide athletics star, his success on the US collegiate scene with Villanova University also blazing a trail for a generation of Irish athletes who followed in his footsteps.
He often recalled his Olympic success with a sense of destiny.
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“There was no moment in Melbourne when I didn’t believe I was going to win,” Delany told this newspaper in 2006, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his Olympic triumph. “I think at that stage I did feel an element of fate. Once I struck and flew by everyone, I was not going to lose. I don’t do maybes, but it is terrifying to think about my life if I hadn’t won that Olympic gold medal. I can’t actually conceive it.”
Delany closed in on his destiny with remarkable momentum. On June 1st, 1956, exactly six months before the 1,500m final in Melbourne, he became only the seventh man in history to crack the four-minute mile, running 3:59.0 in California.
Later, he was badly spiked in an 800m race in Paris, and raced just twice more that summer, unwittingly sparing his racing legs. Still, the then Olympic Council of Ireland confirmed his selection for Melbourne only at the last moment.
The story of his Olympic success at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in front of 120,000 spectators, has gone down in the annals of Irish sporting history. In another interview with this news organisation in 2016, marking its 60th anniversary, Delany recalled the race in detail.
“My only goal was to win,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about second, or third, or running well. Two hours before the race, I’d turn on the nerves, to get the adrenaline flowing, then about an hour before became the cold, calculated, tactician.”
The favourite, and not just for the Melbourne crowd, was the 26-year-old Australian John Landy, who had lowered Roger Bannister’s mile world record to 3:58.0. Britain had three finalists, including Brian Hewson, and while there was a sense any one of the 12 might win, Delany was the dark horse.
“The important thing is the shape of the race, to be in a position to strike, make the one move, to win. That was the only tactic I knew, learned from my first coach, Jack Sweeney, back in CUS in Dublin.”
With 60 metres to run, Delany made that move, passing Hewson to win in 3:41.2, an Olympic record by exactly four seconds. The German Klaus Richtzenhain came through for silver, Landy for bronze.
Delany famously fell to his knees in prayer: “I just knelt down to bless myself. 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. I was raised with all the scruples of a Catholic boy of my generation, and this faith in a greater being. I prayed because every race was like a huge crisis, with the risk of being beaten, running badly, or being injured. I wanted spiritual support. But I would always pray for the ability to demonstrate the talent I had. It was never ‘let me win’. So I was cheating slightly.”
Among the early influences on his life was the open space and the Avoca river, which flowed behind the house where he was born at Ferrybank in Arklow on March 6th, 1935, giving him an appreciation for the simple freedoms he later associated with running.
The family moved to Sandymount, south Dublin, when he was six years old, but Delany never forgot his Wicklow roots. Nor has Wicklow, and the house where he was born is recognised by a commemorative plaque outside, erected by Arklow Chamber of Commerce in 2001, with the brief inscription: Birthplace of Ronnie Delany, Olympic Gold Medallist 1,500 metres Melbourne 1956.
Delany’s fame on the back of that Olympic victory in 1956 is still remembered worldwide. In 2006, also to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his Melbourne triumph, he was granted the Freedom of Dublin. Arklow has since added a statue and Delany Park, also named in his honour.
“All my life I have been proud of my origins in Co Wicklow,” Delany wrote in his book, Staying The Distance, also published in 2006. “Although the family moved to Dublin, my mother and I, in particular, maintained close links with friends in the Arklow and Avoca areas.”
He also had Dublin roots via his mother, who lived near Leeson Street Bridge, and whose father was a publican at 8/9 Sussex Terrace in Dublin 4, that pub now named O’Brien’s.
It was during his teenage years growing up in Sandymount in Dublin that Delany’s date with Olympic destiny was slowly realised. His elder brother, Joe, was his first athletic role model, but his pursuit of greatness in sport always came from within. He abandoned a prized position in the Army Cadets (leaving his father “aghast”) and found a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in Kilkenny.
“I would train every day in James Park, a sort of agricultural place,” said Delany. “Stripping in a barn. My company were sheep and bullocks ... And there was a sort of madness to the whole thing, in a nice way.
“The funny thing is, I hated training. I was probably a little lazy, but I trained smart, and I brought a lot of my own views to the table. It was only when I went to America that I really believed I could be the Olympic champion.
“And I did love to race, had an insatiable appetite to win. Jumbo Elliott at Villanova was a great manager as much as a coach. The slogan in our dressingroom was, win, or bust’. Jumbo never put his arm around you for finishing second. The only expectation was to win. I was a product of that environment.”
A series of lingering Achilles tendon injuries soon followed his Melbourne success and the 1960 Olympics in Rome were a disappointment. Eliminated in the 800m, he promptly withdrew from the 1,500m.
“I have no recriminations whatsoever about any of my disappointments,” he said.
Delany retired from top-level racing in the summer of 1961, aged 26, announcing it the same day as his engagement to Joan Riordan. “It’s true, in a sense, that I’ve never run since,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to run around Dublin, because anytime I did, someone would be trying to race me. And I never wanted to be perceived as the Olympic champion showing off.”
He furthered his athletics reputation at the famed Penn Relays in Philadelphia, the oldest and largest track and field competition in the US.
In his sophomore year in 1956, Delany helped Villanova win three Penn Relays titles, running the anchor leg in both the sprint and distance medley. He won 10 Penn Relays titles in all.
In the winter of 1962, he was part of the Irish 4x800m quartet that toured the US indoor circuit. Having already broken the European 4x800m record in 1961, they won three of their five races.
In 2022, to mark and celebrate the 100th staging of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NACA) track and field championships in Eugene, they selected 30 past winners and inducted them into the inaugural Collegiate Athlete Hall of Fame.
Names like Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, Jim Ryun, Henry Rono, Steve Prefontaine, Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner and Merlene Ottey. Delany was in there among those 30 names, too, the sole Irish recipient of what is immediately and abundantly evident to be one of the highest accolades in the sport.
Delany’s NCAA career was indeed stellar, winning four individual outdoor titles during his four years at Villanova University from 1955-58, during which time he also won his Olympic 1,500m gold in Melbourne. In his final year, he completed an 880 yard/mile double, after winning the mile and finishing second in the 880-yard in 1957: those points helped secure Villanova their first and only NCAA outdoor team title.
When Delany made the cover of Sports Illustrated in February 1959, three years after winning his gold medal, it was when he extended his four-year unbeaten indoor streak to 40 races (33 over the mile), while also lowering the world indoor mile record three times, taking it down to 4:01.4.
He did win two other championship medals, 1,500m silver at the 1958 European Championships in Stockholm, and gold in the 800m at the World University Games in Sofia in 1961.
