John Davies - The Olympic ideal

By TIM WATKIN

The race began for John Davies on a square, 200-yard cinder track in Essex. For the boys of St Egberts College to run 100 yards (about 100m), they had to navigate a 90-deg angle.

It's an impossible-sounding track, but a school sports day in 1952 gave 13-year-old Davies a glimpse of the possibilities a track career could afford, a career that would lead to Arthur Lydiard's running squad, an Olympic medal, coaching world-beating athletes and, immediately after the Sydney Games, becoming chairman of the New Zealand Olympic Committee.

His greatest athletic achievement would come in the 1500m in Tokyo in 1964; a race of three full laps and one three-quarter lap, in just over three and a half minutes. That 1500m was the race of his life. A life run very much like a 1500m race.

On that original Essex track, the teenager kicked away well from the start.

"We used to go down and run on this square track," he recalls, "and these other kids would always beat me. It came to the sports day and I actually won. That was the first race I ever won."

His second life-changing race came 11 years later in New Zealand. It was the Hastings Highland Games during Easter 1961. A 22-year-old Davies lined up in a handicap race, with staggered starts according to each athlete's times. The "limited" handicap was designed so the star runner starting on scratch - in this case reigning Olympic gold medallist Murray Halberg - would win.

"Halberg caught me but I outsprinted him in the straight and won his trophy," Davies recalls. "He came up to me afterwards and spent at least an hour telling me about the sort of training I ought to do ... That was about the time I started thinking about becoming a more serious athlete."

Hang on. We're running ahead of ourselves. This is the second lap and you don't know about the first yet.

John Davies was born in north-east London but is Welsh-bred. His parents lived in Wales' industrial south until his father became a policeman and moved to London.

"The only way for a young bloke to get out of a pretty bad scene was to do something like that. He became a chief inspector," Davies says.

Before John started high school his father landed a four-year contract handling security and safety on the Roxburgh dam, and brought his wife and two sons to New Zealand.

"We all liked it so much we stayed ... For my mother it was a real shock but for me, I remember it as being a fabulous time. We had a life that you probably couldn't live today. We were young kids with .22 rifles and gold pans, and we used to climb around the mountains, shoot rabbits."

The active upbringing gave Davies - a self-proclaimed "weed" - a foundation of fitness.

Davies' teenage years were shared between the hills of Central Otago and the halls of Dunedin Boys High School. Sport dominated his school life - running, soccer and rowing. Running became a passion.

"If you look at my career, I never ran a bad race really. I believe that's because I enjoyed it so much and loved the challenge of trying to race against people. I never got tired of it. It excited me."

Near the end of his school days, his first lap, he stumbled. After a rowing regatta, he and 21 schoolmates had a few beers at a church social. It meant trouble at school the next day. "Another guy and I were asked the question and we said yes, and we were expelled. All my so-called mates who said no, they carried on at school.

"My father was real neat about it. He said, 'Hey cut your losses, let's get on with life.' I thought that was a great lesson. "

It's a philosophy Davies still holds to. You can see it in the straightness of his frame, the directness of his words. His former coach Lydiard says Davies has the qualities all Olympic champions must have - sincerity and intelligence.

While Davies lays no claim to being a spiritual man, he is known as an honest and idealistic one. These characteristics have put him at odds with the New Zealand Olympic Committee board over the Mark Todd affair. Immediately after the Sunday Mirror claimed in June that Todd had been using cocaine, Davies called on him to make "a clear and frank statement." Such honesty, he argues, is the Olympic way.

"I am a believer in the ideals of Olympism and I think they've got a great deal to offer society. I just think all of these things have to be handled in an open, transparent way."

Those words hardly describe the way the committee handled the Todd affair. But that is a matter for the fourth lap.

The second lap, his adult running days, started unencouragingly with eight months in Kinleith's paper mill when the family moved to Tokoroa. Davies then went to teachers' training college at Ardmore, which had been the athletes' village for the 1950 Empire Games. Fittingly, it was there he met Lydiard in 1960.

"The tutor asked me to speak to the students and told me about John being a good runner," says Lydiard, now 83.

But it would be two more years before Davies was gripped by the Olympic dream and asked to train with Lydiard's squad.

"We had to do a major study at training college, and I studied the ancient Olympics.Then in 1960 I saw this most fabulous film of the Rome Games. I went to the 2 o'clock session and I was so rapt. I went with my girlfriend and we came out and I said, 'I'm going to go to the 5 o'clock session.' She put up with me going to the 5 o'clock session. When the 8 o'clock session came and I said, 'I'm going to that,' she said, 'See ya later.' That was that, but I went to the film three times that day."

Davies took his running seriously after that.

"I went back to Tokoroa and said to my mate, 'I'm going to run a hundred miles a week.' That season, 1960-61, I brought my mile time down from 4.15 to 4.02."

In 1960 and 61, prophetically, he came third in the 880 yards at the national champs behind Peter Snell. He made the 1962 Commonwealth Games team and, in Perth, won a silver medal in the mile behind Snell.

Next stop: the Tokyo Olympics, 1964. Because Tokoroa's only athletic track was commandeered for rugby in winter, Davies trained in the forest.

"It was a pumice surface. You could deliberately run close to the ferns and bush on the side of the road and you'd get this tremendous feeling of speed."

A bout of pneumonia threatened his chances, but by the start of the Games he was in top form. Then in his semifinal, with only the first four making the final, he almost blew it. Lydiard had told him to go hard 500m out.

"Off I went and it was like everybody had spoken to Lydiard, because everybody went."

He was forced wide, two runners got clear and he was part of a blanket finish behind them.

"This Belgian guy came up and said, 'Where were you?' and I said, 'Third.' He said, 'No, I was third.' Then some other guy came up and said, 'No, I was third."'

When the announcement was made, in Japanese, Davies counted the names and decided he was fifth. He was distraught, and headed out of the stadium with his father.

"Someone shouted, 'JD!' and I turned around. There were the names on the scoreboard and I was third." And my father hit me, you know how you do with excitement, and he winded me. So I'm very happy and doubled over."

In the wait for the final, Davies' nervousness grew.

"I'd get butterflies ... I'd lie awake running races. I'd be excited and nervous all the way right up to a race. And the gun would go and all that would disappear. Then I was just racing against people and I enjoyed that."

It was a joy that almost undermined his performance that October day in 1964.

"I often think that if I'd had in my mind something more ... I was leading for a fair portion of the race, and with a lap to go I was in the lead and I can remember going round thinking, 'Fancy leading the Olympic 1500m final.' I'm starting to dream. I wasn't thinking, 'Okay, let's make it hard for all these guys and blah de blah.' It was Peter Snell who woke me up when he went past me."

He knew something special was going to happen.

"Something more happens to you. Murray Halberg says that. I'm sure Peter Snell felt that in Rome. I felt it in Tokyo ... I woke up and I had this sort of confidence. I've had the same feeling about a horse in the Melbourne Cup, Toni Hodgkinson in 1996 and Anne Audain in 1992. You just know it's going to happen."

While he wished he had run more aggressively, he doesn't "for one minute" believe he could have beaten Snell that day. He ran third and was thrilled.

"I wasn't one of these people who say, 'I have to win.' That's why, with people like Snell, it never bothered me to race against him. As long as I felt I could give it a good go and have a good race against him, that was the satisfaction for me."

Hardly the stomach-pit hatred of losing that marks most champions today, and Davies admits it probably prevented him from becoming a better athlete.

That, and his Achilles' tendon. In 1965 he toured Europe with a Lydiard squad and attempted longer distances. "In Czechoslovakia I was warming up for the 1500m and Lydiard came up to me and said, 'John, I want you to run the 3000m and have a go at the world record.' He just announced it to me like that."

He missed by a second. "At that point we realised I'd probably run pretty well over 5000m. But I never got the opportunity because I tore my Achilles' tendon."

Davies' running career, his second lap, was over.

Although it should be noted that Davies beat Snell more times than anyone else (four), he could well have been defined as the third man. The Herald story of October 22, 1964, is headlined in bold capitals, "Snell Rampant in Olympic 1500 Metres Field." Below, in lower case, "Team mate Davies is a gallant third."

Most often, the rampant boldly charge on while the merely gallant lead lower-case lives. Davies has not let this happen. On October 2 he becomes New Zealand's Olympic number one.

The move from athlete to administrator has not always been easy. This was the difficult three-quarter mark in the third lap where, as Davies says, "you've lost sight of the finish and seem to be in a wilderness."

He worked with computers and coached in his spare time. Runners like Dick Quax and Audain came under his tutelage and continued New Zealand's middle-distance success. In 1986, burned out in the computer industry, he gambled some of his superannuation and became a professional coach.

He struggled in these wilds, reverting to computer consultancy and picking up media work to subsidise coaching. In 1989 he joined the board of Athletics New Zealand, then set up Athletics Marketing and Management with Quax, which was contracted by ANZ to solve their marketing problems. That's when the trouble began.

"People accused him of wearing too many hats in the sport," says Quax. "He was a coach, involved in the marketing and on the board ... He's an impeccably honest person, so to be accused ... of plundering athletics and doing things to serve our own interests was difficult."

Davies: "It all got very nasty because people within the sport started saying terrible things about my honesty and integrity. It became the worst time of my life."

He left the board in 1995 but continued his partnership with Quax. They run the annual Marley Games. In 1997 he became the founding president of New Zealand's Olympic Academy, established to promote the ideals and values of the Olympic movement. Despite corrupt IOC members and drug-cheats, he has attempted to give voice to the ideal.

"I accept the reasons for people's cynicism but if you actually read what the Olympic movement is about you cannot argue but that it is a good thing. To promote things like equality, respect, excellence, enjoyment of effort - what the hell's wrong with that?"

In May this year 41 sporting bodies, eight board members and seven order holders (those who have given great service to the movement) elected him NZOC president. It was a move away from leaders Lydiard describes as "no-hopers" and "professional committee men."

Then came Mark Todd. Davies articulated the same ideals that got him elected and, to his surprise, found himself on the outer. In contrast to the transparency Davies preaches, the Olympic committee he will soon lead conducted a private inquiry, announced its decision and declared the matter closed.

Surely such blatantly conflicting styles will make the relationship between new president and committee members fraught?

"Yes, that's quite true," Davies agrees. "But I'm sure they have the same attitudes about how we should deal with each other."

That is: openly and without animosity.

So we should expect such issues to be handled differently from October?

"I will argue for them to be dealt with in a particular way ... I like the issues out in the open. I like to have intelligent debate about them. But at the base of everything for me is this thing called Olympism."

He will go no further on the subject. The Todd issue is part of the 2000 Olympiad and Davies is planning for Athens 2004. He wants to help with funding and planning, and focus the committee more on the sports rather than administration, improving the Olympic experience for athletes.

Just as in Tokyo in 1964, he's in the lead with a lap to go. The bell's been rung and he's running strongly, just enjoying being in the race.

He's looking good for a strong finish.

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