RONNIE WAS OUR GOLD STANDARD

Dearly departed Delany remains the benchmark

- BY DAVID COUGHLAN

RONNIE DELANY always said the drive between Dublin and Shannon was more dangerous than the 17 hours it took flying to New York when he was at Villanova.

One trip on that treacherous road was more memorable than any other... his belated homecoming from the 1956 Olympics.

Delany won gold in the 1,500 metres in Melbourne. No Irish competitor has managed that feat since.

His achievement was all the more remarkable given the hurdles he faced back then.

The Arklow-born runner was 19 when he left Shannon, bound for Villanova University in Pennsylvania in September 1954 on an athletics scholarship.

Most of the other passengers on the flight were departing a country on its knees for good.

"It was quite a lonely time and a very emotional scene at Shannon where you had fiddlers playing and old ladies in shawls lamenting as they watched their sons and daughters leave Ireland, possibly never to come back," Delany told me in 2004.

"But there wasn't much time for emotion. Even at that age I realised that when you have a talent, no one can share it and essentially you have to make your own decisions and play a lot of solo runs."

This was the golden era for middle-distance running.

Roger Bannister had only broken the four-minute mile a few months before Delany started at Villanova.

By the time the Wicklow man turned up at the Melbourne Games two years later, he was in the middle of a 40-race winning streak on the US indoor circuit and had become the youngest runner in the world to break the four-minute mark.

Despite this, he only just made the Irish team by one vote.

It's worth taking that in for a second.