{"id":280,"date":"2025-10-03T11:34:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T11:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=280"},"modified":"2025-10-03T11:34:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T11:34:27","slug":"lymingtons-unlikeliest-hero-track-star-gordon-pirie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2025\/10\/03\/lymingtons-unlikeliest-hero-track-star-gordon-pirie\/","title":{"rendered":"Lymington’s unlikeliest hero – track star Gordon Pirie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The regular writer on local personalities and local history for a free guide, the Lymington Directory<\/em>, is incapacitated.\u00a0 I was asked to step in.\u00a0 Desperate for a subject I looked on Wikipedia for a list of famous names associated with the town I’ve lived in for the past 31 years (next year 40 years living in Hampshire – I don’t count 1981-3 when working temporarily in Southampton as Canterbury was still my de facto home).\u00a0 To my amazement I saw listed the great middle-distance runner Gordon Pirie.\u00a0 Here’s my 700 words on someone who, along with the likes of Derek Ibbotson, surely inspired The Victor<\/em> comic’s ‘Alf Tupper, The Tough of the Track’ [not the only proletarian comic book hero when\u00a0The Victor<\/em> appeared mid-sixties, eg ‘Braddock VC’ was a flight sergeant – the times they were a changin’].<\/p>\n

Which Lymington resident was voted by viewers BBC Sports Personality of the Year?\u00a0 No, it\u2019s not Ben Ainslie.\u00a0 Seventy years ago, in December 1955, the trophy was won by an athlete, Gordon Pirie.\u00a0 In the 1950s British sports fans were obsessed with middle-distance running, and the inaugural winner in 1954 was Chris Chataway, just edging out Roger Bannister.\u00a0 Medal-winning record-breakers like Bannister, Chataway and Chris Brasher were high-flying Oxbridge graduates.\u00a0 Yet there was another, less glamorous tradition of endurance running in postwar Britain, embodied in working-class lads who combined arduous full-time jobs with high mileage training regimes \u2013 hard men like Huddersfield\u2019s Derek Ibbotson and Croydon\u2019s Gordon Pirie.\u00a0 Pirie died in December 1991 \u2013 in Lymington.\u00a0 How come?<\/p>\n

All we know is that Gordon Pirie was a declared bankrupt dependent on state assistance and suffering from bile cancer.\u00a0 No relatives were traceable in 2013 when England Athletics inducted him into its Hall of Fame.\u00a0 Do any Directory<\/em> readers recall Gordon Pirie, and know why and how he came to spend his final days in Lymington?\u00a0 How many readers will have heard of him, let alone recall his sporting heyday in the 1950s?\u00a0 Only a handful may have heard wireless commentaries from the White City or watched monochrome transmissions from the Stadio Olympico, but Pirie left a legacy.\u00a0 He was a fixture of Britain\u2019s sporting landscape long after his international career ended.\u00a0 Admirers of Ovett, Coe and Cram knew how much they drew on an earlier generation of middle-distance runners.\u00a0 By the 1980s Pirie was coaching in New Zealand, a hot house for middle-distance runners; his unique training methods were captured in a posthumous publication, Running Fast and Injury Free<\/em>.\u00a0 Nor were his achievements restricted to the track: anyone keen on orienteering knew that Gordon Pirie had been a pioneer of the sport, twice winning the British Championship.<\/p>\n

In Running Fast and Injury Free<\/em> Pirie stated his credentials: \u2018I have participated in three Olympic Games (winning a Silver Medal in the 5000 metre race at the 1956 Melbourne Games) and have set five official world records (and a dozen or so more unofficial world records).\u00a0 I have raced and beaten most of the greatest athletes of the time, and have run to date nearly a quarter of a million miles.\u00a0 I have coached several of Great Britain\u2019s and New Zealand\u2019s best runners, some of whom have set their own world records.\u2019\u00a0 What Pirie didn\u2019t say is that: at all three Olympics he ran in both the 5000 and 10,000 metres; he was equally speedy at 1500 metres and the mile; and his medal-winning achievements extended to the European Championships and the then British, Empire and Commonwealth Games.\u00a0 What this shows is that Gordon Pirie was a winner: he broke records with consummate ease (three times in the summer of 1956), but he also ensured his place on the podium.\u00a0 Only when he went to Rome in 1960 did he discover his best years were behind him \u2013 a disappointing Olympics redeemed by a lung-bursting sub-four minute mile on his return home.<\/p>\n

Gordon Pirie had started out as a bank clerk.\u00a0 Unlike Ibbotson, an electrician, Pirie had no trade to fall back on once the glory days were over.\u00a0 In an amateur era a precarious lifestyle relied on grants, loans and generous expenses; no private income or parallel career in journalism, finance or medicine had ensured comfort and security.\u00a0 A man of strong opinions, Pirie had few friends in Fleet Street, and the Amateur Athletics Association frowned on his training under the supervision of Woldemar Gorschler, a West German pioneer of biomechanics.\u00a0 Three As officials took an even poorer view of Pirie when he turned professional, competing for money and accepting high-fee challenges like racing around Spanish bull rings.\u00a0 Establishment disapproval and a rackety private life explains why he became a global itinerant.\u00a0 Yet in New Zealand he received a warm welcome from admiring and aspiring athletes.\u00a0 So why come back to Britain, and why choose the south coast?<\/p>\n

To rescue Gordon Pirie from semi-obscurity we need to know more.\u00a0 For sports enthusiasts, and indeed for anyone interested in Lymington\u2019s immediate past, we should remember this great athlete and celebrate his brief presence among us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The regular writer on local personalities and local history for a free guide, the Lymington Directory, is incapacitated.\u00a0 I was asked to step in.\u00a0 Desperate for a subject I looked on Wikipedia for a list of famous names associated with the town I’ve lived in for the past 31 years (next year 40 years living … <\/p>\n

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