Kiwi 800m standouts have a mythical record, as well as world athletics champs spots, in their sights.
MARC HINTON reports
There are records and then there are records. And the one being pursued by New Zealand’s leading 800 metres runners, James Preston and Brad Mathas, definitely belongs in the latter category. You can forgive them both for being just a little daunted by the prospect of maybe, possibly, one day hauling in a mark that has not just stood the test of time, but ground it into dust.
It was more than 61 years ago, on February 3, 1962, when the athletic phenomenon that was Peter Snell sizzled around a sodden grass track at Lancaster Park in Christchurch to set a world record for the 800 metres of 1 minute 44.3 seconds. It was a performance, just seven days after he’d broken Herb Elliott’s mile world record in Whanganui, that had the whole world sitting up and talking about the “Sherman tank with overdrive,” as Sports Illustrated writer Leslie Hobbs memorably depicted the Kiwi colossus.
Snell’s Whanganui mile had been remarkable, as he nudged under Elliott’s famous record with a 3:54.4 run that few had seen coming, and took many on the night by surprise. But his 800m just a week later was a different body of work. It beat the previous mark by a second and a-half (he also set the 880-yard world record). To this day it’s the fastest anyone has ever run over that distance on a grass track. It’s also the oldest national record recognized by the IAAF for a standard track and field event.
We could go on. It stood as a world record for 11 years and as Oceania’s area record for 56 years. It remains the oldest mark on the Athletics NZ books, and a time that would still put a two-lapper in pretty fine company even now.
“It’s pretty tough to comprehend quite how fast that record is,” says the Wellington-based Preston, New Zealand’s top 800m exponent who was unbeaten over the two laps during the southern summer. “The faster I’ve gotten over the years, you start to respect that record a lot more. He did it on grass, and I believe he almost did it by himself. The last couple of years as I’ve started to run quicker times, you fully realise how quick that record was. When you factor in that he retired relatively young, you wonder what he could have run.”
Adds Mathas: “It’s crazy. I think it’s more crazy that he did it on grass. If he’d been on a synthetic track he probably would have run 1:42 or 1:43-low. It’s mind-boggling that it was on grass.”
The 25-year-old Preston already occupies a hallowed spot in Kiwi 800m running, with his 1:45.30 PB achieved in Pfungstadt, Germany, in June last year placing him behind only Snell and the great John Walker (1:44.92 in 1974) on the all-time Kiwi list. That’s an achievement he very much takes in his stride. “I’m just trying to run fast and they’re just guys who have run fast before me,” he shrugs.
After running a season’s best 1:45.85 in Melbourne in February, the assistant project manager for an engineering consultancy firm in the capital was among 12 Kiwi athletes given “guaranteed” spots at the world champs in Budapest in August, providing he remains within World Athletics’ rankings criteria which he hopes to underline with a series of races in Europe in June. The Melbourne-based Mathas, 29, who has a PB of 1:46.00 set in finishing second to Preston in February’s Maurie Plant meet, is among a second tier of 12 athletes “conditionally” selected for Hungary (he’ll have to meet stipulated conditions, and remain within the invite cutoff as he too heads to Europe to try to seal his spot).
Preston’s response is an interesting one when asked if Snell’s record drives him on his quest to enter special territory over the two-lap event. “The short answer would be yes. The long answer no,” he explains. “That record isn’t the be-all and end-all. I want to run as fast as possible, and take these opportunities. But I don’t want my career to be defined as this guy who almost broke Snell’s record. In the same breath, if I achieve everything I want to, I should be able to run the time.”