Today in History

1974 ‘The greatest middle distance race of all time’

The men’s 1500-metre final brought the curtain down on the 1974 Christchurch Commonwealth Games. Tanzanian Filbert Bayi won in a new world record time of 3 minutes 32.16 seconds. New Zealand’s emerging middle distance star John Walker came second, also breaking the existing world record. The remarkable feature of this race was the fact that the third, fourth (New Zealander Rod Dixon) and fifth place getters ran the fourth, fifth, and seventh fastest 1500m times to that date. The national records of five countries - Tanzania, Kenya, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand - were all broken in this race.

Bayi and Walker continued their rivalry in 1975. On 17 May Bayi broke Jim Ryun's eight-year-old record for the mile (1609m) by clocking 3:51.0. The record was short-lived, as Walker became history's first sub-3:50 miler on 12 August the same year, running 3:49.4 at Gothenburg, Sweden.

The much anticipated clash between the two runners at the 1976 Montreal Olympics failed to eventuate. Tanzania joined other black African nations in boycotting the games to protest against the All Blacks tour of South Africa earlier that year. Bayi’s participation in the games was already in doubt, though, as he suffered from a bout of malaria shortly before the Olympics were due to begin.

Image: Filbert Bayi and John Walker cross the line in the 1500m (BBC)