Wayde van Niekerk’s gold medal after his record-smashing 400m Olympic sprint in Rio last month, brought back some happy memories for me.
For it was almost exactly 46 years ago, on 6 September 1960, that my cousin Malcolm Spence ran an equally epic race of his life in the Rome Olympics.
I did not know Malcolm well as he was 16 years older than me and lived in Johannesburg while I was growing up in Mozambique. But I went to boarding school in Jo’burg, and he would sometimes fetch me on a Sunday to spend time with his family.
The fact that our fathers were brothers was perhaps the only thing we had in common. I am short and squat, he was tall and lanky. I also am not a very fast sprinter, while he was a lightning bolt.
However, I went to the same school that he attended a decade earlier, and for some reason he was better known as a rebel, rather than an exceptional athlete.
One legend still being told was how he leopard-crawled along the classroom floor to measure the maths teacher’s ginormous feet while said teacher was dozing off. The stifled laughter from fellow pupils woke the drowsy tutor and Malcolm got a caning.
After school he played top-level rugby where his bursts of speed soon propelled him to become South Africa’s greatest quarter-miler, until Wayde burst onto the scene.
Malcolm’s last race is still spoken about with awe and to this day is regarded as one of the bravest runs in Olympic history.
About a month before the Rome Olympics, his Achilles tendon seized. He couldn’t jog more than a 100m without having to pull up in excruciating pain. Just to get onto the track needed a cortisone injection straight into the tendon.
No one thought he would be able to race, but Malcolm had other ideas. In the first 400m heat, he arrived at the starting blocks with a powerful injection of Novocaine squirted directly into his heel. He won easily in 46.7secs.
Supreme determination
The pain when the injection wore off was agonising. No one thought he would make the next heat. Except Malcolm.
The next day he was at the starting block after another jab of Novocaine and finished second behind American Otis Davis in 45.8secs.
Then came the finals – six of the fastest quarter-milers in the world were about to square off against each other.
Once again, the doctor shot a dose of Novocaine straight into Malcolm’s ruined tendon. But the race was delayed and there was huge concern that the painkiller would wear off before the start. Malcolm was now limping badly.
The gun fired. Malcom shot out of the blocks like a cheetah, reaching the 200m mark in 21.2 secs – unheard of in those days. The pace was blistering.
Then as they entered the final stretch, Malcolm started hobbling as his tendon snapped. He refused to surrender, and in the last few yards, Otis Davis and Germany’s Carl Kaufmann just pipped him, being jointly clocked at 44.9 secs and smashing the world record.
Malcolm hung on for a bronze medal, just 0.6 of a second behind.
It’s billed as perhaps the greatest Olympic 400m of all time. Both Davis and Kaufman say it was Malcom’s heroic pace – with a destroyed Achilles tendon – that got them under the psychological 45 second barrier.
Malcolm never ran again. His Achilles was removed and two other tendons were spliced and encased in a platinum sheath.
I last saw Malcolm about nine years ago when he came to England and visited my sister, also a gifted runner.
He had advanced cancer, and he took us out to dinner at the nearby pub. I had always been in awe of him and thanked him for his kindness when I was a homesick boy at boarding school all those years ago.
He gave me a brief hug as we said goodbye. He died in December, 2010, too young at 73.
Throughout his life, the courage he showed in Rome during that epic race was always with him.
So I’m absolutely delighted that the 400m Olympic medal has finally come back home.
