Runner’s big victory took 314 days to decide

Don Gehrmann, a celebrated American runner who won a major 1-mile race — the 1950 Wanamaker Mile — that took almost 11 months to decide, died July 23 in a nursing home in Madison, Wis. He was 94. His son Jim on Wednesday confirmed the death.

In a college career at the University of Wisconsin from 1946 to 1950, Gehrmann won 87 of 99 races from a half-mile to 2 miles. From 1948 to 1951, he won 39 consecutive major mile races indoors and outdoors. His winning streak included four victories (1949-52) in the Wanamaker Mile in the Millrose Games, then held in Madison Square Garden.

In the 1950 Wanamaker Mile, on Jan. 28, Gehrmann seemed to catch Fred Wilt at the tape, or did he? Both first-place judges said Wilt had won. Both second-place judges said Wilt had finished second. The finish-line picture from the phototimer was inadvertently blocked by a judge. And so it was left to the chief judge, Asa Bushnell, who was at the finish line, to make the call. He declared Gehrmann the winner, with a time of 4 minutes, 9.3 seconds.

But that did not settle the matter. Wilt, an FBI agent when not competing and a future inductee of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, protested, and 13 days later the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s registration committee, reversing Bushnell, declared him the winner.

Then Gehrmann protested that decision, and the matter carried over almost a year later to the AAU’s national convention in Washington. By a vote of 314-108 — 314 days after the race — that ruling body’s board of governors upheld the chief judge’s decision and declared Gehrmann, forevermore, the victor. Gehrmann won three NCAA mile or 1,500-meter championships outdoors and two AAU 1,000-yard titles indoors. He won a record 12 Big Ten titles in indoor track, outdoor track and cross-country and in 1950 was voted the Big Ten’s best runner in its first 50 years.

In the 1948 Olympics in London, at age 20, he was the only non-European to reach the 1,500meter final. He finished somewhere between seventh and 10th.

In 1952, less than an hour after he had broken the world 1,000yard outdoor record in London, Gehrmann was sitting in the stands. He had just downed hot dogs and a soda when the only American in the quarter-mile decided that he could not run because of an injury. Gehrmann rushed to the track, ran the race and beat the best English runners, winning in 47.9 seconds.