Rod Dixon's homecoming: The Kiwi Olympic legend who made America run

Rod Dixon. Photo / Photosport

In lockdown in one of the most remote, beautiful places in New Zealand, Gannet Heights, near the start of the Abel Tasman track, Rod Dixon is thinking about how much he loves home.

If the winner of the 1983 New York marathon, and a 1972 Olympic bronze medallist in the 1500 metres, does permanently leave the United States, where he's been based in Los Angeles for the last 18 years, half a million kids in America will have a memento to remember him by.

Dixon's running career in the 1970s and 80s was a stellar one, but talking to him now it's obvious he takes just as much pleasure from a fitness programme he initiated in Northland in 1990. He took it to America, where the idea caught fire. This year, in Los Angeles alone, it had 43,000 primary school kids running every day.

"They do a playtime run round the school. Kids from 4 to 12 years old do laps. Don't make it PE, call it playtime. Three times, five minutes a day. Make it 15 minutes they'll sit down. Make it five minutes they'll play."

His Kidsmarathon foundation gives children a training guide, where they can record each day how far they've gone on a measured course around the school. Over eight to 10 weeks, the little runs add up to the 42km of a marathon. "I asked the kids what they'd like to mark the achievement, and they said 'We'd like your [Olympic] medal'. Now 500,000 kids have got one of my medals. I had so much fun when I was a kid, growing up in Nelson, now I want kids to have the same fun from exercise. We tell them finishing is winning."

Rod Dixon (688) during the 1500m final at the 1972 Olympics. Photo / Photosport

Dixon played a range of sports as a schoolboy, but settled on running in the footsteps of his childhood idol, his older brother John.

"If John said I could do something I believed him. I remember he told me I could climb this tree and I did, and then I said, 'How do I get down?' and he said, 'You figure that out', and he went away. Came back an hour later saying, 'You better get your butt back down. Dinner's ready and Mum and Dad are wondering where you are'."

At the Munich Olympics in 1972 Dixon went from bring ranked 47th in the world over 1500 metres to third. "I was like Dixie in Wonderland," he laughs now.

Another inspiration had been Sir Edmund Hillary, who when Dixon was 10 had spoken at his primary school, telling the children to make their goals and dreams higher than Mt Everest.

In 1972, Olympic medal in his pocket, a 22-year-old Dixon knocked unannounced on the door of Hillary's Remuera home to show him the medal, and thank him for the motivation.

"That's fine," said Sir Edmund, "But can you promise me one thing. Will you inspire the next generation for me?"

"Just like you did to me?"

"Yes."

"I'll do that," said Dixon.

And so the seed was planted for the Kidsmarathon foundation.

What made Dixon's name in America was his New York marathon victory in 1983. He swears now that on the start line he knew it would be the defining moment of his life.

"I was thinking, 'This is it. You better deliver on your dream. Because for 12 months you've trained for this, and dreamed about this'. And off we went.

"I was very disciplined. I'd written my splits on my fingers and my thumb. I knew the times I wanted. At 23 miles, I looked at my hand, and I was within seconds of what I'd aimed for. That's what you must have, you must have a plan, and you've got to stay with it.

Rod Dixon during a photoshoot in 1995. Photo / Photosport

"The leaders were way out ahead of me at the halfway mark. But slowly, but surely I was catching up with them. Then, near the end, I caught up with [Englishman] Geoff Smith. I knew who he was, I knew he'd run 3m 57s for a mile, so he was a force to be reckoned with.

"I noticed he was staying in the middle of the road, but I knew that like motor racing you should run from apex to apex. I thought, 'Every corner I'm picking up a few yards, and there's about 30 corners to go. There's the 15 or 16 seconds I need'.

"Sure enough, right at 26 miles I caught him. I knew he was capable of coming with me, so I had to duck down to the inside of the corner, and run as fast as I could, so when he saw me in his peripheral vision, I'd be sprinting, and he wouldn't chase me. I started to run out of gas, but the finish was just 300 yards up the road.

"When I kissed the ground at the finish and looked to the heavens it wasn't grandstanding. It was giving thanks."

A visit to the White House would follow, where Dixon produced his Olympic medal ("I didn't see the sense in keeping it in a box") and asked President Ronald Reagan to hold it. A delighted Reagan and Dixon then swapped stories about the Appaloosa horses Dixon knew Reagan bought from Kiwi country singer-turned-horse breeder John Hore.

Dixon now travels a lot throughout the States with his foundation, and while he owns an apartment in Agoura Hills, in Los Angeles county, he says he still calls New Zealand home.

He'll turn 70 in July, and this week mused that, now a grandfather, with adult daughters living in Auckland: "It's starting to look like it's time to come home".