True sportsman
SIR: John Landy was the second person to run a four-minute mile, but he didn’t, as Mark Mason says in his Rant (October issue), win the 1956 Olympic 1500m title. That honour went to Ron Delany, who
remains Ireland’s only gold medallist on the track. Landy won the bronze. The race where Landy stopped to help another runner and went on to win was the Australian mile championship in the same year. The beneficiary on that occasion was another great gentleman, Ron Clarke.
Landy and Delany are still with us, but Clarke has passed away, as have the man who might well have won the 1500m had he not been entered for the 5000m instead, Yorkshire’s Derek Ibbotson, and the third four-minute miler, László Tábori, who never ran in the Olympics thanks to the Soviet invasion of his homeland, Hungary. Michael Duffy, Gyeonggi-do, Korea