Quax a fast, brave sharpshooter
Dick Quax was talking in 1980 about what often happened when he was out on a long training run.
‘‘It’s always people as they’re speeding by in a car. They say, ‘Jesus, there’s Dick Quax. What can we say?’ Out the window: ‘Quax, you wanker!’ It’s never a reasonable sort of conversation. ‘You’re Dick Quax, I disagree with what you’ve said.’’’
Quax, who died yesterday, was one of our greatest runners. He set two world records, one in the 5000 metres and one in the 4x1 mile relay. He won an Olympic silver medal.
But it was never quite enough for Kiwis to universally embrace him, to make him the revered figure his contemporaries Sir John Walker and Rod Dixon became. Controversy and Dick were always just a soundbite away.
The problem was that he was as frank and honest off the track as he was daring on it, at a time when, in the brilliant phrase of comedian John Clarke, the sporting heroes we loved always said they hadn’t actually won, ‘‘the others just happened to finish behind me’’.
Quax deserves to be fondly regarded. I first met him in 1970, and if the car shouters had actually had a conversation with him they would have found he was not only intelligent and articulate, but also had a keen sense of humour, not least about himself.
When he was invalided out of the 1974 Commonwealth Games with a broken bone in his foot, he was even able to wryly muse: ‘‘I swear to God, I think some of the bones in my body must be made out of glass.’’
He was certainly one of the most fearless athletes New Zealand has ever seen. In his prime in the 1970s I doubt he ever entered a race he didn’t believe he could win.
As a reporter at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh I watched in amazement as a 22-year-old Quax was the only man in the field in the 1500m who didn’t chicken out when confronted with the great Kenyan Kip Keino.
Keino was a front runner, and the red hot favourite. Was Quax spooked? Hell no. He actually raced to the front, and set the pace for the first 300m. When Keino then strode past, Quax stayed with him, and even tried to jump to the lead at the turn into the home straight. Keino was too good and took gold, Quax silver, and there actually was daylight back to the rest.
Shin splints plagued Quax over the next few years, until a
1975 operation in Hamilton freed muscle sheaths in his legs.
He had been reduced to a shuffle by shin splints in the
5000m at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and Dick being Dick, he didn’t just drop out of the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch with his foot injury.
He was kicked out of the Games village in a blaze of publicity after making entirely accurate, but incendiary, statements in a Sunday Times newspaper column, saying the Kenyan athletes were a danger to other runners with their undisciplined tactics.
‘‘All boxing fans should be at QE2 Park tomorrow for the heats of the 5000 metres,’’ he said in the column. ‘‘Everyone expects the odd elbow and shove, but when it’s as blatant as it was [in the earlier 10,000m final] by the Kenyans, someone should have been disqualified.’’
When he got back home to Auckland he found he’d been sacked from his job in advertising sales at the New Zealand Herald because he’d written for a rival paper.
But better times soon arrived. Free from pain he won silver in the 5000m at the 1976 Montreal Games, and a year later set a world record for 5000m.
Come 1978, and the Edmonton Commonwealth Games, and his openness with interviewers had him in the spotlight again. He announced he planned to run the 10,000m in a white singlet, purely to counter the Canadian heat. Our marathon runners would do the same thing without a hint of controversy.
But then Quax was interviewed by a TVNZ reporter. Wouldn’t running in black give him a boost? No it wouldn’t, was his honest, but fateful, reply.
‘‘In hindsight,’’ he told me a couple of years later, ‘‘I should have said, ‘Yeah, putting on the black singlet makes a hell of a lot of difference’. That’s what people want to think, that it turns mild mannered individuals into supermen. It probably would have been best to come straight out and lie about it.’’
But if there was one thing Quax didn’t easily do, it was lie.
We didn’t always see eye to eye over the views he embraced, and, as he always did, freely expressed, in his later life as a local body politician.
Having known him as a friend for almost 50 years, I can vouch for the fact those opinions would have always been genuinely held.