Our indoor games with big-time feel
35 years ago, The Spectator Indoor Games moved into the spotlight at brand new Copps Coliseum
Long after they have been surpassed, there are certain sports numbers that still ring like Pavlov’s bell. They flick a twitch of recognition that runs deep.
The 50-goal season, 60 homers, 1,000 rushing yards, 60-point NBA game, the hat trick.
And track and field, the most global sport, has one of the biggest: breaking the four-minute mile.
The distance isn’t raced formally very often now, it’s usually the 1,500 metres, and the four-minute threshold was first crossed 66 years ago. Yet, it still triggers something.
“For the general public, people who kind of know but don’t really know, something resonates with the four-minute mile,” Marcus O’Sullivan, one of history’s all-time great distance runners, told The Spectator from Pennsylvania where he coaches the Villanova track team.
“Everyone has to drive it or has walked a mile. It’s one of those events that has stood the test of time.”
O’Sullivan grew up in Ireland, is a longtime resident of a country that still uses miles not kilometres, but you get his point.
He has run exactly 101 sub-fours, third most in history behind American Steve Scott (136) and New Zealand’s John Walker (111). And he holds a special place in Hamilton sports lore. Or should.
Which brings us to the fact that Monday was the 35th anniversary of indoor track and field going bigtime in Hamilton, when the 91st Highlanders Athletic Association moved its athletics meet from the James Street Armouries into the brand new Copps Coliseum as The Spectator Indoor Games.
It is one of the most underappreciated eras of Hamilton sport, and for the regulars — about 8,000 fans each year, and 17,050 for Ben Johnson’s first official race (1991) after his ’88 steroid suspension was lifted — O’Sullivan provided its singular moment.
On Jan. 15, 1993, two months before he won his third straight world indoor championship 1,500-metre title in Toronto’s SkyDome, O’Sullivan broke the unbreakable: the four-minute plateau on Copps Coliseum’s already-aging trampoline of track.
His 3:59.40 was the 61st of O’Sullivan’s sub-fours and the only one ever run at Hamilton’s games. The fans, on their feet yelling the final minute, were his audible time clock as he tore threw the last lap, visibly fighting the track’s tight-banked curves. Many of them had been there the year before groaning in unison as their Captain Ahab’s harpoon fell just 0.40 of a second short of his White Whale.
For more than a decade, The Spectator Games (later the Nu-Skin Games) were a major part of the world’s elite indoor track and field scene, shifting to mid-January to kick off the vibrant North American Grand Prix calendar. International and domestic stars competed on a Friday night, but there were popular elementary, high school and university meets held the day before and morning of with a few of the best competing on the Big Night.
Younger athletes were introduced to the meet and still are, as the Hamilton Indoor Games — although cancelled last year because of teacher-government issues and this year because of the pandemic — have become an elementary and high school event.
There were many memorable moments, including American Billy Payne’s nearly 19-foot pole vault into the rafters, appearances by the likes of legendary distance runners, dozens of world and Olympic champions, Johnson many times, Donovan Bailey, Bruny Surin and the rest of the 1996 Olympic relay team, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, top Canadians and local stars such as Paula Schnurr, Kevin Sullivan and Graham Hood.
But O’Sullivan’s mile was the alltime highlight. He’d already quietly rejuvenated a career he had thought of leaving, by concentrating on the mile, determined to join American Steve Scott (136) and New Zealander John Walker (111) as the only men to ever have reached the century plateau.
And how about this? All three of those history makers ran the boards in Hamilton. Walker raced in the first Copps mile in 1986 and Scott raced here three times. Scott always said four minutes in Hamilton was like 3.55 anywhere else.
“To run four minutes that night was extremely difficult,” says O’Sullivan, a five-time winner of New York’s iconic Wanamaker Mile, and part of that incredible Irish quartet with Frank O’Mara, Ray Flynn and Eamonn Coghlan who dominated middle distances.
“The Hamilton crowd was incredible and I remember thinking on the last lap that this is really worth doing. Knowing the track and you walked away feeling that it was a job well done,” he added.
“I was supposed to be there the first year in 1986, and was at the airport in Philadelphia with John Walker when there was an issue with my passport and John suggested I might have trouble getting back in,” O’Sullivan says. “So I stayed but vowed to get to Hamilton. It took me a few years but then I came up a few times.
“I still say that night in Hamilton meant as much to me as winning the world championship two months later.”