Ronnie Delany obituary: Irish sporting hero

Ireland had a population of 2.9 million in 1956 and at breakfast time on December 1 of that year most of it seemed to be sitting by a radio, then standing, jumping and finally running out into the street to celebrate.

Had there been live TV pictures of the 1,500m final at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, they would have seen a blur of green hit the front as a breathless voice on the crackling broadcast from the BBC Light Programme shouted “the man from Eire is making a move”. On the final bend Ronnie Delany was the clear leader of the most eagerly anticipated event of the Games and did not let up until he had crossed the finishing line with outstretched arms and a beaming smile to win gold for Ireland. Overcome with emotion, the lanky 21-year-old knelt on the track, made the sign of the cross and thanked God.

Roger Bannister had achieved what was thought to be impossible when he ran the first sub-four minute mile on May 6, 1954 before retiring from the track to study medicine full-time. The Olympic 1,500m final included five of the six other men who had broken the barrier since, including Delany. One of them, the Australian John Landy, was the strong favourite to win gold at the slightly shorter distance.

Tall and whippet-like with his green vest billowing in the wind, Delany believed in himself. “There was no moment in Melbourne when I didn’t believe I was going to win,” he told the Irish Independent in 2006. “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.” His strategy was simple. Make sure he was on the shoulder of Landy by the final lap. When Landy kicked for home, Delany would be ready.

With 400m to go the excitement among more than 100,000 mostly Australian spectators had reached fever pitch; just five metres covered the field of 12 runners, including Great Britain’s Brian Hewson, who would be leading the race with 200m to go. Delany made his move just before the final bend, running past Landy and Hewson and outkicking everyone on the home straight to win in an Olympic record of 3min 41.2sec.

Beaten into third place in front of his adoring home crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Landy showed exemplary sportsmanship in his moment of bitter disappointment, helping Delany to his feet and warmly congratulating him. The victor could hardly take it in. Delany had, after all, very nearly not been selected for Ireland’s Olympic team. He had built a reputation as a world-class middle distance runner while studying economics at Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Pennsylvania. Expectations were high when he returned to race in Ireland in the summer of 1956, with talk of Delany being the first Irish person to win an Olympic gold medal on the track since Bob Tisdall won the 400m hurdles at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Delany duly flopped. In one race against Landy he tried to make his move too early and finished 50m behind the Australian. Many Irish officials questioned the expense of sending him to Australia for several weeks. Delany later said that he came back too early after being injured in a race in Paris when he was “spiked” by another athlete. He was voted on to Ireland’s team of 12 Olympians (including three athletes) by only eight votes to five.

Many people still cite Delany’s victory as the greatest day in the history of Irish sport, especially as it came at a time when the nation’s economy was in the doldrums and emigration was high. “It made us all feel that we had achieved something unique, that we could compete against the best in the world,” said his friend, the rugby union player turned businessman Tony O’Reilly, in the foreword to Delany’s 2006 memoir Staying the Distance.

Thousands of people greeted Delany’s homecoming to Dublin. Streets were named after him all over Ireland, even if some of them were misspelt Delaney Street. To mark the 50th anniversary of his gold medal, Delany was given the freedom of Dublin and there is a statue of him in his home town of Arklow, Co Wicklow.

Winning Olympic gold requires several factors to align on the day: a good night’s sleep, being free of niggling injuries and no unforeseen events to cloud a positive mindset. “The instrument is the individual,” Delany said. “The person has to have the courage to follow their instinct — it comes down to the person on the day.”

The stars never aligned for Delany again and in later years he struggled to recover from an achilles tendon injury. He did win a bronze medal in the 1,500 metres at the 1958 European Athletics Championships in Stockholm, but at the 1960 Olympics in Rome he failed to qualify for the final of the 800m.

Yet no one could take away his status as an Olympic champion. As such, Delany was an inspiration to Irish athletes thereafter, from Eamonn Coghlan to Sonia O’Sullivan. However, no Irish athlete has won Olympic gold on the track since.

Ronald Michael Delany was born in Arklow in 1935. His father, Patrick, moved the family to Sandymount, Dublin, when Ronnie was six. The child was educated at the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School and the Catholic University School (CUS).

Sports-mad, ran out of the front door dreaming that one day he would be able to beat his older brother Joe to the school gates. “On reflection, it was serious, hard training,” he recalled.

In school athletics, Delany was, by his own admission, “so so”, never coming near to matching the performances of his brother. Yet a maths teacher called Jack Sweeney saw something special and began to coach him. “He honed my sprinting ability at the end of a race. He taught me that you could really only make one decisive move in a race. Wait till later and make a decisive move closer to the finish. That became, if you like, my trademark.”

After winning the All-Ireland Colleges half-mile title in 1953, Delany knew he was probably the best middle-distance runner in the country. Tennis and rugby had been higher up the teenager’s agenda but as he began to win races, “I gave up all other sports.”

Aged 18 he qualified for the final of the 800m at the European Championships in Berne in the summer of 1954 but finished eighth and last. At the end of that summer he took up a scholarship to Villanova University. Delany considered himself an 800m runner, but as soon as the athletics coach Jumbo Elliott saw Delany on the track he decided to convert him to 1,500m because he had the endurance to stay the course and still kick explosively in the final straight.

In June 1956 the 21-year-old became the youngest man to run a mile in less than four minutes (and the seventh overall), running 3:59 at a meet in Compton, California, and beating Denmark’s Gunnar Nielsen, the world record-holder.

Some athletes lack the stomach for the gladiatorial and psychological challenge of beating an arch rival in a championship final. Delany relished feeling the adrenaline course through his body as he eyed his competitors on the start line. “If you’d asked me to run, say on a training track, a fast half-mile: no. Couldn’t do it,” said Delany, an unfailingly affable and courteous figure. “But if you said to me: ‘Run against Johnny Smith’, suddenly the whole thing becomes different. I’m now racing. It was this excitement of racing, the prospect of having to compete against the other man, that was exhilarating.”

After winning Olympic gold Delany described the rest of his career as an “anticlimax”. He did however, win 40 races in a row at indoor meetings in America from 1956 to 1959 and broke the world indoor mile record three times. He also played his part in the “Miracle Mile” at Santry, Dublin, in 1958 when the first four competitors to cross the line broke the previous world record: Herb Elliott (3:54.5), Merv Lincoln (3:55.9), Delany (3:57.5), Murray Halbarg (3:57.5).

He signed off his athletics career with gold in the 800m at the 1961 World University Games, after which he announced his retirement from top-level competition and proposed to his sweetheart, Joan Riordan, whom he married in 1962. She survives him along with their four children: Lisa, Ronnie Jr, Jennifer and Michelle.

Delany graduated from Villanova with a degree in economics and considered staying in the United States, where he had become a celebrity among the expat community and was offered roles in plays on Broadway and a TV series about a young Irishman making it good in the US. He returned to Dublin because he was missing his family. For the next 25 years, he worked for Aer Lingus and then the Irish ferry company B&I, in charge of marketing and operations. In 1988, he set up his own marketing and sports consultancy.

He kept himself fit into old age, remained an active member of the Irish Olympians Association and became good friends with another middle-distance running legend from the British Isles with whom he shared a devastating kick and a place in the pantheon. Lord Coe, president of World Athletics, said: “I cherished his support, friendship, and the moments we shared together, not least at the World Athletics Heritage Mile Night in 2019 when we brought together the band of brothers whose feats in the mile distance resonated across the sporting world.”

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