The life and times of Ronnie Delany
‘I can only look back on my career with great joy’
‘Here’s the bell for the last lap. Hewson comes up alongside Lincoln, and now Landy makes his move. 300 yards to go, Hewson seems to be holding on. They’re almost there. Look... that man in the green shirt, where did he come from? It’s the Irish miler, Ron Delany. He’s flying now... fourth... third .... second now... he’s actually sprinting, he doesn’t seem tired in the least bit. He’s coming on like an express train. He’s passing Hewson, and Hewson seems powerless to catch up... Delany wins! His surprise victory in the record time of 3 minutes, 41.2 seconds is one of the most unexpected sensations of the games. Ron Delany, running for Ireland, couldn’t be beaten.’
THE name ‘Ronnie Delany’ is plastered throughout the Arklow area. At the south end of the town, a housing estate bears the name ‘Delany Park’. Almost two kilometres north, at Parade Ground, plans are afoot to unveil a statue depicting the likeness of Ireland’s last gold medal runner. Meanwhile, his childhood home at Hillview has been commemorate with a ‘real first citizen’ plaque since 2001.
Further afield, in Strabane, Co. Derry, a pair of roads – Delaney Crescent and Olympic Drive – were committed to his name all the way back in 1957, mere months after he won 1,500m gold at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. Although, he only learnt of that particular honour over two weeks ago, after the local Derry council were informed that ‘Delaney Crescent’ contained a misspelling of his surname.
‘I would have been up in Strabane maybe once, in Derry once. I did not know the area well. I did not have a connection, which was what was fascinating. The fascinating thing was that they did it so quickly. I won the Olympics in December and the naming took place in January.’
Delany was not a resident of Arklow for very long; he and his family moved out when he was just six years of age, in 1941. He remains connected with that area, however, and still has precious memories of his early childhood there, including visiting the town on several occasions with his mother, Bridget, in subsequent years. He remembers his early years quite vividly, including finding what he described as ‘lead pellets’ on the strand, which may or may not have been linked to the Kynoch munitions plant explosion that occurred in 1917.
More than anything else, he fondly reminisces about those holidays with his mother.
‘Arklow has given me many, many honours over the years, which were lovely occasions,’ he explains. ‘I came up to Dublin when I was five or six and I still have memories of Arklow. When I was 19 and living in America, I used to take my mammy down for a week’s holiday in Arklow. We stayed in the hotel at the top of the town and my mother had a lovely time. She visited all of her friends and she went over to the Woodenbridge. She had a delightful time. It was lovely to spend some quality time with my mother.
‘I must confess that I did run off back to Dublin for a few dances,’ he admits with a giggle.
‘Incidentally, when I would be down there, people would recall my mother and my father (Patrick-Anthony). I remember being over in Woodenbridge Golf Club and the caddy who was caddying for me, told me that he knew my father and he gave me information that I did not have. He said: ‘your father had a great two-iron.’
‘I think daddy was a member of Woodenbridge and Arklow, so he had the privilege of belonging to two lovely golf clubs in the area.’
After leaving Arklow and moving to Sandymount, Ronnie’s sporting career began to blossom. He established himself as a potential tennis prodigy before ultimately committing himself to athletics. It was in that discipline that he chiselled a near incomparable legacy for himself. In subsequent years, he won Irish national championships, NCAA and AAU titles in America, before finally cementing himself as an icon at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, where he became the last Irish track and field competitor to win a gold medal.
Delany’s competitive spirit can be traced back to when he was young. His older brother, Joe, is mentioned as one of his first role models. Joe was a distinguished athlete in his own right, taking part in horse shows at the RDS and being an acclaimed runner himself. His relationship with Joe played a major part in him developing a rich sense of wanting – nay, needing – to win.
‘I would race him from Sydney Parade to the house on John’s Road, because I wanted to get in first because mummy would make these lovely cream desserts – creamy rice puddings – and you would want to get the end of the pot. You would be racing your brother for the spoils.
‘The only thing is that I would never beat him. I’d scuttle off the end of the train and get out of the gates first, and he would always – he was a beautiful athlete – come strolling by me and go majestically around St. John’s Church. He would get into the house first and earn the prize of the rice pudding.
‘He beat me every time. I was used to being beaten by Joe. Maybe that is why I wanted to win so much. He beat me running home from the train. He was a better hockey player than I was, he played for the first team while I played for the third. He wasn’t a good tennis player or cricketer. I was better than him at those.
‘An older brother is an older brother; you look up to him, you admire him, you wonder at his handsomeness, at his sociability. You are not contesting. I never contested anything in the sense of any rivalry or unfriendliness.’
His formative years were spent playing a wide variety of sports.
His house in Sandymount was nearby to Railway Union RFC and Claremont Tennis Club. Meanwhile, within walking distance was London Bridge Road, where hockey was played. In that sense, his childhood was surrounded by sport. In fact, one of the only sports that he didn’t play was soccer, such was the degree to which sport played an integral role in the local community.
It was in tennis that Ronnie showed early potential, winning Leinster titles with Claremont, thus indicating that, in an alternative future, he may have been able to forge a legacy in that discipline.
‘I could have been a contender, to quote Marlon Brando. I joke, of
course. I was a good tennis player because I lived beside the tennis courts and, from the age of eight or nine, you had a racket in your hands and, of course, the back of my house looked out on the tennis club. I could see people playing on Court 7, which was a bad court because it was in the shade.’
Ronnie goes on to reminisce about the prominent elephant in the room when it comes to growing up in Sandymount in the early 1940s. At the same time that a younger-than-preteen Delany was enjoying the carefree nature of youth, the Allies and Axis Powers were waging the Second World War across Europe. While Ireland remained neutral throughout the conflict, the country was drawn into its devastating consequences. On May 31, 1941, mere months after the Delany family relocated to Dublin, the North Strand was bombed by Nazi Germany. 28 people were killed in the tragedy, which took place less than five kilometres from O’Connell’s CBS, where Ronnie attended primary school.
Despite his young age – he was just six when the North Strand was bombed – it was impossible for Ronnie not to pay attention to the destruction that was taking place around him. His childish, innocent obliviousness to it all did allow him and his friends to make light of an otherwise desperate situation by playing war-based games, but it did not make it any easier to disregard reality.
‘You had impressions,’ he says. ‘A lot of the strand was bombed, and there were a lot of casualties. The bombs used to be dropped on the city; they’d be bombing Belfast and, rather than flying back with a load of bombs, they dropped them on Dublin. I remember, one day, I was up on the Sandymount Strand Road, and a spitfire was chasing a – I don’t remember what the German plane was.
‘You were not frightened by it. You did not have a sense of fear because you had the security of your family; you ate well and you had all the love of devoted parents. You had no sense of fear.’
Even when discussing the playful coping mechanism that he and his friends used to compensate for growing up during the war, you can sense the winning mentality that he has championed throughout his life. When talking about when he and his mates would be playing games such as ‘Marines’, he is sure to point out how he would beat them all.
‘I did not need encouragement. I had a role model in my brother, Joe. I was fostered more than encouraged,’ he insists. ‘I wanted to take part. I wanted to run when I started to run. My father was a great provider, her provided the tennis rackets, cricket bats, paid the membership of the club and he also provided me with running shows. He was fostering me and mentoring me, to a degree. I did not need much advice because, instinctively, I knew what to do.’
He began to find his calling in running while attending primary school in O’Connell’s. While there, he was nurtured by Brendan Hennessy, the man whom he credits as being a major influence on how he viewed the sport of athletics moving forward. He frequently expresses pride in the coaches that he had throughout his career. He says that Hennessy taught him to appreciate the joy that comes from it; Jack Sweeney in Catholic University School mentored him with regards to the finer details of tactics and strategy, and whom taught him that ‘you can only make one decisive move in a race’ – a mantra that would prove extremely beneficial in subsequent years; and Jumbo Elliott in Villanova University was more of a man manager than a standard coach.
These are just three individuals on a long list of people that helped to motivate Ronnie over the years. He says that his heroes growing up were Archie Gillespie in tennis, Joseph O’Meara in hockey, and the likes of Bruce Woodcock, Joe Baksi, and Billy Conn in boxing.
In addition to the men whom he looked up to, he has been able to surround himself with some of the finest sportspeople of their respective generations. While at O’Connell’s, he regularly togged out for races alongside the likes of Niall Brophy, who went on to earn 21 caps playing rugby for Ireland; Derrick Gygax, who ran in the Olympic mile for Canada; and Paul Cauldwell, who played soccer for Fairview CYMS. Meanwhile, by attending Villanova University in America, he is part of an esteemed class of past and future alumni, including Al Atkinson, Eamonn Coghlan, and Sonia O’Sullivan.
Along the way, he formed lasting relationships with some of the men against whom he raced. Brian Hewson, who Ronnie raced on several occasions, including the 1956 Olympics 1,500m final and the 1958 European Championships 800m final, was one such friendly rival, as well as John Landy, whom Ronnie also raced against in the Olympics.
‘The relationship with all of my rivals was great. We were peers, we were fellow Olympians. Once an Olympian, always an Olympian. We didn’t take the track of throwing our private lives into it. My friendship with John Landy, my friendship with Brian Hewson, mu friendship with John Holden, that was the beauty of sport. We fraternised later. We reminisced. We weren’t doing it from the perspective of ‘you beat me, I beat you.’ We were doing it for the joy of sport. That’s what I enjoyed all my life: the fellowship with my peers.’
Make no mistake about it, while he was able to maintain bonds with his adversaries, he was a winner above all else. The confidence with which he carried himself went hand-in-hand with an attitude and temperament of wanting to win every single race. It is a mindset that carried him through earning provincial and national championships at Catholic University School, in Dublin. In 1954, the same year he was given a scholarship to study a bachelor of science degree in economics, before majoring in marketing, in Villanova University, he qualified for the finals of the 800m at the European Championships. While he confessed that he didn’t possess the training discipline and fitness to win that final – he finished eighth in the race that was won by Hungarian Lajos Szentgali – he considers it as a significant moment wherein he attained the confidence to go from there and become the iconic athlete he did.
‘That was when I discovered that I could run. I knew at the beginning of that summer in 1954, June or maybe May, when I had my first men’s championship race and I won the Irish title at 1:54. That was when I knew I was good.
When I went to the Europeans and got through the heat and the semi-final, that was almost cathartic for a 19-year-old Irish boy to do this.’
That issue of fitness was rectified later that year, when he embarked on his studies in Pennsylvania. It represented a difficult change for a man his age to make. Unlike today, lines of communication weren’t readily available in 1954, which means that, once he emigrated to the States, it meant losing touch with his loved ones. Other than what he describes as an ‘unnatural’ change of scenery, Ronnie blossomed in America.
He was close to invincible on the indoor tracks; he enjoyed a 40-race winning streak, winning four consecutive Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships, and three National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) titles In addition, he set the world indoor mile record on three separate occasions, and went on to win a gold medal at the World University Games, in Bulgaria in 1961. Then there was the occasion when he won the half-mile and mile races on the same day, an accomplishment that was dubbed: ‘The Delany Double’. Then there is the distinction of him being the first-ever Irish athlete to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
‘The American system, very simply, was based on competition. In that era, in the 50s in Ireland, travel was not accessible as it is today, so your competition was against the English, mostly.
‘In America, from day one, you go racing; I raced cross-country in the autumn. They were all preplanned. I raced indoors for 10 weeks, I started in January and finished in March. I had a race every weekend. Then, outdoors, I raced inter-collegiates and national collegiates. I was very proud of my national collegiate career. I won national collegiate titles. I never lost a mile or 1,500m.
‘That was the difference. You race so much in America and you learn so much tactically. When you got into a crowded field, you knew exactly how to handle it. It was a great schooling, the American system. To this day, the debate is stay at home or go on American scholarship. The plus for America is the level and frequency of racing.’
All of what he had learnt and achieved from winning that first All-Ireland championship in 1952, retaining it in 1953, qualifying for the finals of the Europeans in 1954, his historic dominance of the AAU and NCAA in America; all of the lessons that had been bestowed upon him by Brendan Hennessy, Jack Sweeney, and Turbo Elliott; all of the times that he lost to his brother Joe in the race for his mother’s rice pudding; all of it culminated in December 1956, when he travelled to the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia.
He is the first to confess that, from the perspective of outside observers, his place on the 12-person Team Ireland for that year’s Olympic Games was all but certain. He had sustained an Achilles injury earlier that year and couldn’t train for a month, which played a part in him losing twice to perennial-rival Brian Hewson that summer. Despite the exterior doubt and pressure, Delany’s self-confidence and resolve remained unshaken.
‘’People didn’t take into account that I was injured and that I hadn’t trained. There was a lot of speculation as to whether I should be sent to the Olympics or not. It never affected my own confidence because I knew exactly what was happening. I knew I was injured. I knew I had not trained, and I knew I hadn’t the fitness. When I went back to America, the opposite was the case; my training was superb, my quantity of training was immense, the quality of my training was extraordinary, and I went to Australia believing that I could win.
His unflappable will to win came to fruition in the race itself. Having qualified from his heats with relative ease, he began to formulate a plan for the final. By doing so, he channelled the advice that Jack Sweeney had given him all those years ago. ‘You can only make one decisive move in a race.’ He was not concerned with being clocked with the fastest top speed. All he was concerned with was breaking the tape ahead of anybody else. He was famed for being able to mount strong finishes to win races, and that is exactly what happened.
For much of the race, Delany sauntered near the back of the pack as Murray Halberg, Brian Hewson, John Landy, and co. went about their business ignorant of what was to come. Aided by the pack ahead of him remaining condensed together, Delany began to mount a charge as the race entered its final couple of laps. Going into the final turn, Delany found himself in fifth-place, having spent much of the contest in 10th. At this point, the tall, muscular Irishman was less of a super athlete, and more of an unstoppable locomotive. He charged past the opposition before throwing his arms wide at the breaking of the tape – a move which he jokes that he had rehearsed well in advance of the games.
Just like that, with Klaus Richtzenhain and John Landy further back in second and third respectively, Ronnie Delany had achieved his ultimate ambition of becoming an Olympic champion. Fully aware of the value of his advice, Ronnie promptly sent a telegram to Jack Sweeney, with a simple message: ‘We did it, Jack.’
‘You are joyful. You kneel down and say a prayer of thanksgiving. You cannot quite believe it. Then, immediately after it, you have to adopt the role of being the world champion. You go into press conferences and have to speak intelligently and listen to what they are asking you. Immediately after the event, you are sharing what you have achieved with your teammates, with your family at home in Ireland.
‘I knew what I had done. You knew when you had won. I knew I had won that day, and I knew that it was an extraordinary accomplishment and that it was my destiny. You don’t go around boasting that you are the Olympic champion. You just continue with your life. Your demeanour is important in how you behave as an Olympic champion, how you behave appropriately as a sportsman.’
That Olympic gold represented the apex of the Arklow native’s athletic career. In 1958, he won bronze at the European championships, coming at the end of a gruelling year that saw him race an estimated 30-40 times. He qualified for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, but plagued by an Achilles injury that he had picked up in June 1959 and one which would have a hand in his retirement two years later, he finished last in the second round of heats for the 800m, meaning he wouldn’t be qualifying for the final. He remained steadfast in his self-belief and rebounded the next year when he won gold in the 800m at the 1961 World University Games.
By the time he made the decision to permanently step away from athletic competition in 1962 – at the age of 25 – a number of factors were in play. Despite recovering to being able to win gold in Bulgaria the year before, the Achilles tendon injury became a recurring problem for him. At the same time, a picture of life outside of sport was beginning to form when he married his wife, Joan.
For all of these reasons, and more, Ronnie ultimately chose to call time on one of the most illustrious careers to have been enjoyed by any sportsperson to come from the Emerald Isle.
Now that he has been immortalised in his hometown of Arklow, where his childhood home is somewhat of a tourist attraction, he can reminisce on a career very well spent.
‘I was racing as a world-class athlete since I was 19. I was racing much more than you would race today. I was running 30-40 races a year. I was delighted to get on and put on a bit of weight and enjoy a normal life. I reflect on it with joy. I reflect on it with a great sense of setting goals, achieving goals, and living up to my ability and achieving my destiny of winning the Olympic Games. I can only look back on my career with great joy.’