The Running Man
In the 1960s, Arthur Lydiard’s proteges ruled the running world. One, the versatile Bill Baillie, is still competing. Peter Malcouronne catches up with him.
The Lovelock Track at the Mt Roskill War Memorial Park is an unlikely site to seek athletic immortality. The grass field in the centre is a fortnight late for a cut: the track itself, made of bitumen with shredded truck tyres added for a bit of give, looks tatty and worn-out. But step out on it and you can feel it’s a fast track, always has been. Those old tyres were an ingenious addition, ensuring the surface was springy but not jarring. It was here, in his finest hour in 1963, that Bill Baillie broke two world records.
There was hardly anyone watching when he started to run, but his record attempt was being broadcast on 1ZB and soon hundreds, then thousands came down to the track to see one of their own take on the world. First, the Iron Man of New Zealand athletics surpassed the legendary Emil Zátopek’s 20,000 metre record. Then he ran further in an hour than any man had before. Further, faster than any of the Flying Finns — further than Taisto Mäkithan, Viljo Heino and Paavo Nurmi — and, finally, further than the great Zátopek himself. As the New Zealand Herald announced: “Baillie Is Now World Man Of Iron”.
Nine months earlier, he had picked this day — August 24 1963 — as the time he would do it. He told Arthur Lydiard his plans and the great coach mapped out a training schedule so that Baillie would be at his peak that still spring morning. Baillie kept his dream to himself, training on the sly.
He’d worked out that he had to average 72 seconds a lap to beat Zátopek’s mark. For the first three-quarters of his run, he was never more than six seconds ahead of schedule, but always at least a second ahead of where he needed to be. A friend chalked his lap times on a blackboard so Baillie knew how he was going and, within a few moments, so did everyone watching.
But after the high-shouldered, short-necked Baillie rounded the track for the 37th time, his mate with the chalk departed from the script. Baillie had managed only a 74-second lap, then another and now, for the first time, he slipped off world record pace. The crowd, sensing that Baillie, who had been so unlucky before, was going to stumble again, urged him on. “Bill, Bill, Bill,” they chanted and, while it lacked the dramatic gravitas of “Za-to-pek!” that used to resound in stadiums across Europe, it had the desired effect. Baillie ran the next lap in 69 seconds and then pounded out the last nine in 70 seconds each.
He ran 20,000 metres in 59m 28.6secs, 23.2 seconds faster than Zátopek. In an hour, Baillie covered 12 miles 960 yards seven inches, extending the great Czech’s mark by 151 yards.
And what does an Ironman do after he breaks two world records? He trots around the track, has his back well slapped, shakes everyone’s hand, and gives his Mum a hug. Then he goes home, mows the lawns, has a celebratory roast dinner with the wife and kids, and is in bed by 10pm. There he lies awake almost the whole night, re-running the race over and over in his head, too excited to sleep.
Nearly 38 years later, Bill Baillie parks his taxi van beside what purports to be the Owairaka athletics clubhouse, a tagged concrete-blocked bunker tacked on to the end of the Wesley community centre. Just in front of the Lovelock Track is a plaque, edged by kikuyu, commemorating Baillie’s world records. Baillie’s wife, Valerie, used to be a school teacher and her pupils would walk through War Memorial Park on their way home. One day a group of them said to her sadly: “We’ve seen where your husband is buried Mrs Baillie. We’re really very sorry.”
Baillie chuckles and sits on a bench beside his track. Two aspirant sumo wrestlers pad past, chafing along for a couple of hundred metres and then walking the rest. It could be a metaphor for the decline of New Zealand athletics but Baillie doesn’t see it that way. “That’s how you should do it,” he says sincerely. “Build up gradually.”
He is an irrepressibly optimistic man, touchingly so, not noticing the scuffed track, but seeing instead a surface that’s held up even after 30 odd years of neglect, or what he calls “low maintenance”.
He still comes down here a couple of times a week and runs around this track for the best part of an hour. Now 67, Baillie looks much smaller than the “thick-set”, “powerfully built” man you read about in yellowed newspaper clippings even if, as he points out, he now weighs exactly 10 stone, four pounds less than his racing weight. He has a long sloping nose of the kind beloved by caricaturists, a resting pulse of 44, but it is his darting blue eyes you notice most, restless and always smiling.
He talks as he runs: quickly, impetuously, honestly. Sometimes he is so eager to get on to the next subject that he leaves a sentence unfinished or else condenses it into a word. “See that lass over there,” he says, pointing to a young Samoan girl lapping the sumos. “Look at how much she’s enjoying it. That’s the key to it. You can also see she’s got talent. She’s well co-ordinated. Seehoweasyshemakesitlook.”
He finds it impossible merely to observe. Twice, Baillie springs up from the bench, on to the track and hares off round the first bend to demonstrate a point he’s making about a race he was once in, what he did, what he should have done, what happened.
Now he is watching another race. The girl, a stick in her hand, is running the imaginary last leg of the Olympic 4x100 metre relay final against her little brother who has an empty Coke bottle for a baton. She has a five-metre start at the change, runs away from her brother, laughing, and wins by half the straight. But the result is soon forgotten as the Olympic gold and silver medallists go on their imaginary victory lap. They acknowledge the crowd on the bench, little realising that the old man sitting here is an Olympian who won 15 New Zealand titles in every event from the half mile to the six miles. That he ran what was for a long time the second fastest marathon ever over an out-and-back course, and then won a two-mile race in Portland, Oregon, just two seconds outside the world record. That he raced against horses at Alexandra Park.
That his own sub-four minute mile compelled a newspaperman to write: “We have just about exhausted ourselves on the subject of WD Baillie. We have used our choicest phrases, denuded the Concise Oxford of superlatives … Last week we said that he was the most extraordinary runner this country has had; on reflection we would go a long way further and say that he is the most remarkable athlete developed anywhere. He has never done anything really momentous in international competition, though he has been close to it, and it may be that he never will, but no one else has ever run as fast over so many distances and it may be a long time before anyone does.”
There are a swag of medals hanging around a lamp in his study. “When I go and give talks about the Olympics to my grand-daughter’s class,” Baillie says, “I put one around each kid’s neck.” Most of the medals are from Baillie’s second career, as a veteran world champion in the 800m and 1500m, and also as an Ironman.
He finds it impossible merely to observe. Twice, Baillie springs up from the bench, on to the track and hares off round the first bend to demonstrate a point he’s making about a race he was once in, what he did, what he should have done, what happened.
Baillie has now “done” nine Ironman races, most of them after he turned 60, and he invariably finishes first in his age-group. At the 1999 European Ironman in Roth, Germany, Baillie was more than two hours ahead of his nearest rival. Check out his training schedule and you’ll understand why.
This is a man who has run, “at a conservative estimate” 200,000 km over the last 50 years and cycled nearly as far over the last dozen.
Over the last 16 years, Baillie has also averaged 80,000 km a year as a driver for Alert taxis. Val does the morning shift and Baillie usually starts at about three or four in the afternoon, working through to midnight or sometimes until 3am on weekends, which gives him “all day to play”.
He has been up a ladder all morning sanding the weatherboards for a re-stain. He built this house in 1981, and the small flat beside it where his brother-in-law, Jeff Julian, the onetime marathon man lives. His daughter lives over the fence in another house that Bill built. The Baillie compound backs on to the Maungakiekie golf course at Mt Roskill, the same suburb Bill Baillie has lived in all his adult life.
He hops down, gets himself a glass of lemon water and pulls up a chair. “Ah, the music of children,” sighs Val, as two feuding small people insist on joining in the discussion at the dining table against their grandmother’s wishes.
“That’s Munich … the opening ceremony,” Baillie says, nodding at the large poster above the kitchen sink, and Montreal, the smaller poster alongside.
You can’t quite make out Bill and Val in the crowd but they were there all right, and have been to another six Olympic Games. They’ve also travelled to “at last count, 90-odd countries”. On another wall is a row of photos taken by Val during a recent Baillie adventure to Africa. A bearded man in flowing robes walks on a mosque roof, a lined lion hunter with an American Civil War-era musket stands in front of a fissured cliff. The photos follow a river through Mali until they reach Timbuktu. The last photo of a single camel caravan is taken there -from the end of the world.
A Japanese doll in a display case stares sternly down on the Baillie table. It was a gift from Kokichi Tsuburaya, the Japanese runner who ran second to Baillie during his world record runs and became a national hero when he got a bronze in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic marathon. He killed himself four years later. “Tsuburaya was having achilles tendon trouble coming up to the Mexico Olympics. He couldn’t train, couldn’t do the work. He thought he’d let his country down.” Tsuburaya left a three-word suicide note — “Cannot run anymore.”
Beside the doll is a laminated photo-poster of a sepia-ed Baillie blasting up a hill. The caption: “Bill Baillie heading for the line to win in the record time of 10 minutes 45 seconds the 1959 Mt Wellington King of the Mountain Race.” He beat Snell and Halberg that day and then rushed home, jumped through the shower and got married two-and-a-half hours later.
How the newspapers of the day loved this tale and how liberally they made use of the exclamation mark. While it was a pity that Baillie didn’t charge into the church a couple of minutes late, still in his running shoes and Lynndale club singlet, it was, nevertheless, a good effort. But no more than what we expected of heroes and, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were few New Zealanders demanded more of than the small band of crew-cut runners from the working class suburbs of Mounts Roskill and Albert, trained by Arthur Lydiard.
They were called Arthur’s Boys, and always they seemed to be in singlets — the black singlet of their country with a larger silver fern then, or the white singlet with a rough-cut block “A” for Auckland. There was Peter Snell whose Lomu-like legs tore up chunks from the track as he powered to three Olympic gold medals and eight world records. Murray Halberg, the slightly built whippet with the withered arm whose Lovelockish approach won him the 5000 metres gold at Rome. The professorial John Davies and the gutsy Barry Magee who both won Olympic bronze medals.
Then there were the marathon men Ray Puckett and Jeff Julian, and the Iron Man, Bill Baillie.
“I believe our strength lay in training together,” says Baillie. Yet Snell details several incidents in his biography, No Bugles No Drums, which suggest that the relationship between Arthur’s Boys was considerably more complex than the “one for all, all for one” ethos which meshed so neatly into the national myth of good keen mateship. Writing about Baillie, “a remarkable athlete” he tended to under-rate, Snell says that his rivalry was “so intense, that it has been difficult to go out on a training run with him and not end up making a race of it…”
‘This no doubt stems,” he concludes, “from the needling Bill subjected me to in my early years of development.”
Snell describes a gut-wrenching run around Stanmore Bay — Baillie claims that Lydiard had ordered him to “run some condition” into the mesomorphic Snell — which culminated in Baillie sneering at Snell: “Crikey, you’re weak”.
Later in his book, Snell suggests that Baillie was “quite carried away with his versatility.”
“He was the New Zealand six-mile champion, he’d lost the three-mile title to Murray only by inches, he’d beaten me over a mile and he’d beaten Ray Puckett over a 30-mile marathon course. He couldn’t resist, naturally, scoring off the so-called specialists he’d beaten … Bill’s attitude of superiority over all other runners wasn’t exactly endearing.”
By now, Baillie had a reputation of being prepared to take on any man at almost any distance at any time. It didn’t matter whether he was running for his club — Auckland had nearly 40 athletics clubs; Baillie’s club Lynndale boasted 500 members — or for his country, Baillie wanted to win.
They ran because they wanted to run faster than anyone else. There was no money in the game then — the amateur regulations allowed just £2 a day for expenses and the small print decreed that trophies must cost no more than £12 6s.
And they ran for us too. Thousands of New Zealanders crammed into stadiums as Arthur’s Boys barnstormed across the country. There were 33,000 at Eden Park in 1962 when Davies beat Snell and Baillie whipped the Australian Tony Cook in the 5000 metres. Twenty-five thousand people, more than the city’s population, were at Cooks Garden, Wanganui, when Snell broke the world mile record. There were 10,000 fans at Tauranga, 3000 at Blenheim, 17,000 at Hastings, 8,000 at Napier.
Peter Snell describes a gut-wrenching run around Stanmore Bay — Baillie claims that Lydiard had ordered him to “run some condition” into the mesomorphic Snell — which culminated in Baillie sneering at Snell: “Crikey, you’re weak”.
Each Sunday morning they would run over to Lydiard’s fibrolite state house in Owairaka and set off on the famous 22-mile Waiatarua run. Baillie, who has done this run several hundred times, remembers the route: “We’d leave from Arthur’s house at number five Wainwright Avenue. Along O’Donnell Avenue,” (with its unauthorised road markings of exactly half a mile apart which Lydiard used for doing time trials) “right into Richardson Road, then left into Hendon Avenue to pick up Murray Halberg. Murray wasn’t really a morning person and so Arthur used to throw rocks on to his roof to wake him up. Then left into New North Road, up past the Blockhouse Bay fire station, down St Judes Street, then along the Great North Road. We’d turn left where Foodtown is (West Coast Road) and run along there until we got to the Scenic Drive. At about the 10-and-a-half mile mark there was a little waterfall where we’d stop for a drink. Then it was another six-and-a-half miles up to Titirangi.”
Lydiard would often run with his boys and Baillie recalls that most of the advice about running and training was given on the road. “You would talk the whole way,” scoffs Val, “and you weren’t always talking about running,” forcing a confession from Baillie that their discussions featured “lots of gossip about girls, more than anything else”.
From Titirangi village they would head down Titirangi Road and then back onto Great North Road. “St Judes used to be the hill that would get us. It’s quite steep and it was a struggle to get up. We’d done close to 20 miles by then.”
In his book Run To The Top, Lydiard writes that “the key to my conditioning training is 100 miles a week.” The notion of training for middle distance events by running the best part of a marathon a day was ridiculed at the time, but Lydiard’s theory was to build his runners’ stamina slowly, so that they would be able to run faster for longer.
It was a training regime that led to Arthur’s Boys ruling the running world for a decade. And as their coach wrote: “I haven’t trained the best athletes in New Zealand, only the little group that lives near my home and those who come to me for help. None of them have been handpicked because they appear to have exceptional qualities. They are not supermen. They are ordinary keen young men of all shapes and sizes but they train the right way.”
For his part, Baillie almost boasts of his limited natural talent: “The ability I had, was to apply myself and to work hard.” An example: “Murray (Halberg) would run 24 four hundreds and do them in 74 seconds, and I would do mine in 72 seconds. He would run 22 miles and I would run 24. No matter what Murray did, I did a little more and a little bit faster. I was always trying to think of how I could beat him.”
He opens a copy of Lydiard’s book, which the author has dedicated “to one of my greatest athletes”. “I would never have been able to do what I did without Arthur,” says Baillie. Still, it seems remarkable that Baillie, so much his own man, would have such a close relationship with the authoritarian Lydiard. The reason, Baillie explains, is simple: Lydiard would never ask you to do something he hadn’t tried first; he knew what he was doing, and that gave his runners confidence. “If Arthur said we are going to do this … break this record, we knew we would. There was no doubt in our minds we were going to do it.”
In 1956 Baillie was ranked 12th in the world in both the mile and three-mile, but his times were not good enough for the Olympic selectors, though they weren’t helped by the sodden grass tracks at home. “You’re wasting your time here,” said coach Lydiard. “Go over to Australia. Train on the hard tracks.”
Baillie missed the 1956 Melbourne Olympics but his scrapbooks, chockful of cuttings of the New Zealand team’s effort, betray no rancour. He stayed in Melbourne for another year after the games, training with Herb Elliot, the Australian miler who never lost a race, running along the Portsea dunes with Elliot’s coach, the fiery, white-maned, eccentric Percy Cerutty.
Cerutty had a penchant for self-affirming aphorisms and a philosophy of masochistic social Darwinism: “The weak fall by the wayside,” he wrote, “and the strong train on. The thing that marks the super athlete is the capacity to suffer, and to stand up to continued suffering.”
Bill Baillie came home in 1957. “Percy said that I was his greatest failure,” he says, laughing. “He reckoned I was too set in the Lydiard ways.”
You will find nothing in Baillie’s scrapbooks about the 1960 Rome Olympics. No mention of the greatest hour in New Zealand’s Olympic history when Snell won the 800 metres followed soon after by Halberg’s triumph in the 5000 metres.
Baillie didn’t make the team. This, despite the fact that he had run his astonishing record out-and-back marathon less than a year before. That he’d easily retained his national six-mile title, though his time was spoiled by a wet track and a lap scorer who had trouble counting once he ran out of fingers. That he had only missed the qualifying target for the 5000 metres by a second. None of this counted and so the most popular runner in the country stayed at home. Baillie was distraught, commentators like the Sports Digest’s CH Jenkins, disbelieving:
“We have been musing over the athletic fate of the splendid William D Baillie, the great Mr Baillie, who should be in the Olympic team, and would be had he not allowed the flaming bowl of skill to spill everywhere. We remember when he first came upon the town in 1954. He went off to the Empire Games at Vancouver, jovial and stout and sturdy and brave, hoping to win fame and fortune. And how gallantly he sang his song. He was barely 19… only dreaming of his fame: when he had gained that mistress by a succession of dazzling achievements at many distances he found her no consoler.
“His restless spirit sought comfort in a fancy that led him everywhere. He stumbled, and got up again, devised new plans for the morrow, another event, repented, and returned to his first love.
“Then, forgetting his intention to reform, and careless of consequence, he would play again for gallant stakes. Sometimes he won, boldly.
“Sometimes he lost, always bravely. As he did this year.
“He had settled on the marathon, his heart full of hope, his head full of schemes. But even his broad shoulders could not successfully carry the burden of a severe attack of boils at a time when healthy vigour was vital. His spirit never gave in but that was not enough. And so an athlete of immense ability failed and stayed at home as others lacking his gifts go to Rome.
“You may think of him as reckless, his nature truant, always looking for change: of his awful waste of talent, but think, too, how gladly he gives, how he delights with his hearty good will.
“Now 26, this distinguished runner is without office. But those who write his obituary would be wrong. Some day an emissary of fortune will find him again. He will be wanted for another great occasion.”
Athletes from a record 94 countries went to Tokyo for the 1964 Olympic Games. Only a generation earlier, Japan had been shattered by war — the torch was lit by the “Atom Boy”, 19 year-old Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima the day the bomb destroyed his city.
The New Zealand team marched into the stadium, led by the reigning Olympic champion Peter Snell to the mandatory “thunderous ovation”, the men graded by height, headed by four members of the rowing eight, “and yet,” wrote a Herald reporter, “right back down the line everyone looked tall.” Presumably this included the 5ft 6½ inch Baillie who had, aged nearly 30, finally made the New Zealand Olympic team.
He smiles, remembering, then takes you behind an alcove in his study. Here, tucked away, is Baillie’s diploma for competing in the men’s 5000 metres final and photos from the race. Baillie was the only New Zealander to make the final, after Halberg, the defending champion, and Neville Scott failed to qualify.
This is what it is like to run in an Olympic final: You check in two hours before your race. WD Baillie, New Zealand, competitor in the men’s 5000 metres final.
You go out the back to warm up, jog slowly round a practice track, then stretch. You walk past the great Australian Ron Clarke, smile faintly at him, for he’s a mate, you’ve stayed at his house, but he looks right through you.
One of the American boys is jabbering away, “good lucking” everyone, but why wish him “good luck” when you don’t? He wants to shake everyone’s hands, for goodness sake. Why would you want to give another man some of your strength?
Stop. Think about your own race Bill. You’ve been running for 20 years to get here. You can win this race, you’re as good as anyone here. Well, okay the American Bob Schul has run two seconds faster but, hey, that’s as good as he’ll ever run. And you don’t have to worry about Murray.
Half an hour before the race starts. You are taken through to the changing room. It’s about 20 foot square with a seat around the outside, and you can still hear the crowd — they sound like the inside of a seashell-even though they’re a 100-yard long tunnel away.
Sit down. Look around the room. No one talks.
You stare at the floor. Everyone in this room has a plan. How they are going to win this race. You want to do nothing stupid, get yourself into a position where you can capitalise on their mistakes. Of the 12 people in this room only, say, half of them are going to do a personal best. Of those six, probably only two, maybe three, of them will really rise to the occasion. They’re the ones you’re going to have to beat and you won’t know who they are until the last 400 metres. You have to be with them then.
You get up and go to the toilet. A little bit dribbles out.
Got to watch Jazy. The Frenchman is rating himself even higher than usual and you know that if he’s with you in the run home, you’re gone. Same with Schul. Just a couple of months before you came home just five seconds outside Vladimir Kuts’ world record, but Schul came from nowhere and nailed you in the straight. Then there’s this runner from Africa, Kip Keino, who’s done some good times, but then he’s from Kenya and they’ve never had any good runners. You get up and go to the toilet. Nothing.
There’s Ron Clarke, the Aussie locomotive. He’s held 19 world records in every distance from the two-mile to the 12-mile. Shit, he’s run 10,000 metres almost a minute faster than anyone else. The best part of two seconds a lap. But you beat Clarke in a 10,000 metre race in his home town, Melbourne, at the beginning of the year.
You kicked past him in the straight — he came back at you, passed you six yards from the tape — but you found something and got him on the line. The photo in the morning paper said it all. You were floating through the tape, your eyes shut as usual, while Clarke, straining to beat you, is falling at the line like he’s been shot. And you beat him again six days later.
Your mouth is dry. You have a mouthful of water, then spit it out. Go to the toilet again.
A blazered official who’s even more nervous than you are blows a whistle. He holds up a board that reads “5000 metres, men’s final” on it, and says “Come”.
You jog around for a bit, stretch some more, change into your spikes. Try to keep warm. The ground announcer then lists the competitors for the men’s 5000 metre final. Representing New Zealand, WD Baillie.
The hum becomes a cheer. You take your mark. The race starts.
This is what it is like to run in an Olympic final: You check in two hours before your race. WD Baillie, New Zealand, competitor in the men’s 5000 metres final.
“I was hoping for a hard track, a dry day, and a hard race,” says Baillie. “My strengths would enable me to hang on to Clarke, and the others would hopefully be burned off. And then I would get him at the end.”
The first part of the race was fast enough. Clarke led — no surprise there — and opened up a bit of a gap on the field. Jazy went after him, hung on, and the others, spattered with cinder dirt, fought their way back.
“You are in a tight bunch of people, moving around. You have an awareness of who is beside you… you wonder, does he have the strength there or not?
“To me it was a matter of ensuring I was in a good position, keeping out of trouble and picking up every little inch I could. Not gradually drifting back.
“You’re conscious of the time — there’s a lap counter calling each lap and a clock at the end of the stadium — but really, time doesn’t mean anything. It was the race itself.”
The race was too slow. Baillie felt this more with each stride but “I wasn’t big enough in myself to go out and push the pace.” He was caught. “I knew blokes like Schul were behind me” — Baillie could hear the crunch of his spikes on wet cinder track — “and I knew that he could outsprint me.”
In his training diary Baillie writes: “Olympic 5000 metre final. 6th 13.51sec, Schul, 1st 13.48.1, then Norporth, Dellinger, Jazy and a Kenyan. Slow run race. Wanted to make pace. It was on and off the whole way. Clarke dropped a 63 halfway through. We were all together at the bell. Schul ran a 54 sec last, me 56 sec.”
Bill Baillie had finished sixth in the Olympic 5000 metres final. “I wanted a good performance. I wanted to be there. In the back straight I was in a position to do it. I was in the right place at the right time, going as hard as I could. I moved up to third place with 100m to go but I just wasn’t quite good enough.” Tears fill his eyes as he remembers. “When I finished the race I sat down and cried. I was just so happy. I was so relieved — I did everything I possibly could have. I could not have done any more. I got everything out of myself that day.”
Commissioned by Warwick Roger in 2000, my first story for Metro was on the runner Bill Baillie. It was more than three decades since the little Lynndale man’s retirement and it initially appealed as a story of a journeyman, a trier — one of Lydiard’s Boys who made up the numbers. Except this wasn’t quite the case. Talking to Bill, you realised very quickly that he’d never be beaten, never give up — that he’d keep on running until he came home. Bill Baillie died on Christmas Day, 2018.
