Usually I have high regard for the obits in the New York Times. Someone said they are the gold standard. And since I follow their obits religiously, I was surprised to learn from an Australian newswoman I follow (@justjenking) that one of her retweets was from Dr. Stephen Clarke (@StephenClarkeNZ), who on December 13 posted the obituary of Peter from a New Zealand newspaper. WTF as they say in Twitter code these days.
It is now December 16 and I just now see a simple AP obit? Didn't Frank Litsky leave an advance obit on Snell? A Tweet was made to Bill McDonald, Obituary Page Editor at the NYT informing him that Peter Snell has passed away.
Maybe it had an effect, because there is a bylined obit by Richard Goldstein online today. I guess Litsky never got around to it before he passed away.
In the early '60s I paid a lot of attention to track and field. I was a runner in high school. Never very good, but always willing. In later years I picked running up again doing road races, until 2010 when I stopped due to a bad back.
In the '60s there were six indoor track and field meets at Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue. I probably went to at least three of them a year. I never saw Peter Snell in these meets, and I'm not sure he ever competed at the old Garden, but I did see Jim Ryun once, who was booed because he couldn't break four minutes for the mile on the Garden's 11 laps-to-the-mile wooden track. Not fair. No one did in those days.
The Millrose Games of 1988 featured the men's Masters Mile with a field containing Frank Shorter, Jim Ryun, Peter Snell and others. These runners were all in their 40s by then, with Peter Snell at 49. The race can be seen on YouTube. Frank Shorter finished third behind the winner Web Loudat.
It's great to watch these guys, even at that age with their antelope strides making yards of track disappear under their feet. The AP obit described Snell's stride as "so powerful he often scarred the tracks on which he ran, kicking up puffs of debris, especially on grass or cinder tracks."
Snell's double in the 1964, winning the 800 meter and the 1500 meter races was something no one had done since 1920, and something that no one has done since. Snell wasn't the only great runner to come from the Antipodes. There was Ron Clarke from Australia, who held world records at an ungodly number of middle distance, even records at a time trial, distance run over a set time.
In the 1964 Olympics Clarke was in the lead in the 10,000 meter race when Billy Mills from the United States caught sight of Clarke up ahead and detected he was starting to tighten up. Clarke did, and Billy Mills, a Marine and a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from South Dakota won, giving the U.S. a very unexpected gold medal. Ron Clarke finished third.
For all of Clarke's records, he never won an Olympic gold. There was a Kenny Noe Sports Illustrated story that told of Emile Zatopek, the great Czechoslovakian runner who in the 1952 Olympics won gold in the 5,000, 10,000 meters, and the marathon, the only person to ever do that, who met Clarke and pressed into his hand one of his gold medals, telling him he should have a gold medal.
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