Bob Tisdall’s dream: True adventures of Ireland’s first Olympic sprint champion

Sometimes it can feel like even the smallest turn of events can have major consequences in life, with the tiniest of margins ultimately deciding our fates.

Turns out Olympic qualification is no exception. Trace the long history of the Olympics and plenty of Irish athletes and teams over the years have seen that coin turning in the air — for some, it fell more fortunately than others.

Think of the Ireland men’s and women’s hockey teams in Valencia last weekend.

Tisdall’s journey to Los Angeles started just three months before those Games were set to begin when a letter with a British postmark arrived in the office of Gen Eoin O’Duffy in Dublin

With Olympic qualification on the line, the women’s team lost to Britain 2-1, the men’s team beat Korea 4-3. Four years ago, as both teams strived to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, the coin fell the other way — the men’s team lost a shoot-out against Canada, while the women won a shoot-out against Canada, and advanced.

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The venue for the Olympic hockey this summer is the Yves-du-Manoir Stadium in Colombes, northwest Paris, which was the main stadium when Paris last hosted the Olympics back in 1924, thus graced by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell and others of Chariots of Fire fame.

That also happened to be the first time Ireland was represented as a free State, and there have been many a close call when it came to Olympic qualification or selection in the now 100 years since; Ronnie Delany for the 1,500m in Melbourne in 1956, for example, or John Treacy for the Olympic marathon in Los Angeles in 1984.

Still, few can rival the qualification tale of Bob Tisdall, Ireland’s first and still only Olympic medal winner in a sprint event. The wonder is that Tisdall even made it to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles; the near miracle is that he ended up winning the gold medal in the 400m hurdles in a world record time. What is certain is that there’s no way could he have pulled it off in modern times.

Tisdall’s journey to Los Angeles started just three months before those Games were set to begin when a letter with a British postmark arrived in the office of Gen Eoin O’Duffy in Dublin, president of the then Olympic Council of Ireland. Like most people in Irish sporting circles at the time O’Duffy knew little about Tisdall.

Born in the central hill country town of Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka, where his father ran a tea and rubber plantation, Tisdall grew up in Tipperary, where his mother was from, and first made his mark on the rugby pitch playing for Nenagh Ormond. Later when he started at Cambridge University he first got into athletics, and in 1931 won four events in the annual intervarsity match against Oxford — the shot put, long jump, 120-yard hurdles, and 400 yards flat.

That also planted the first Olympic seed in his mind, so Tisdall wrote to O’Duffy in late April of 1932 requesting that he be selected for Los Angeles in two events: the 400m hurdles and the decathlon. It did not appear to faze him in any way that the Olympics were just three months away, and Tisdall had not yet competed in either of those events.

O’Duffy may or may not have tossed a coin on this, but either way he did reply to Tisdall, inviting him to take part in the Irish Olympic trials in Croke Park on June 3rd. The qualification time in the 400m hurdles was set at 55 seconds, the Irish record at the time, and despite his complete lack of one-lap sprint hurdling, Tisdall came close, winning in 56.2.

Not enough to get him on the boat to Los Angeles, but enough to impress O’Duffy, who presented him with a second chance at the Irish Athletics Championships, in Croke Park on June 18th. This time, in only his second attempt at the event, Tisdall won in 54.2 seconds, and the rest is Irish Olympic history.

After a two-week training camp in Ballybunion, along with Dr Pat O’Callaghan, who was looking to defend his Olympic hammer title won in Amsterdam four years previously, the 25-year-old Tisdall first lined up for his 400m hurdles heat on the afternoon of July 31st and duly won that in 54.8 seconds. Two hours later he was back for the semi-final and won that too, this time lowering his best to 52.8.

The final was set for 3pm on Monday, August 1st, which happened to be the same time O’Callaghan was in the hammer circle. Despite the stacked field, including the 1924 Olympic champion Morgan Taylor of the USA, and 1928 Olympic champion Lord David Burghley from Britain, Tisdall produced another astonishing run and won the gold medal in a world record time of 51.7 seconds, despite clattering into the last hurdle, which back in those days ruled out the time for record purposes.

And think of how his life journey changed, on the whim of a man sitting at a desk, who read a letter and took a chance on a dreamer

It didn’t matter to Tisdall, who had just won Ireland’s second Olympic medal and minutes later turned his attention to the infield area, where O’Callaghan was having a problem with the length of his spikes. So together they filed them down, before with his final throw of the steel ball and chain, just an inch shy of 177 feet, O’Callaghan landed his second gold medal.

“Having won this race, I have realised one of my life’s ambitions,” said Tisdall afterwards, as if it had been his dream all along. He also finished eighth in the decathlon.

Later settling in Nambour, a small coastal town in Queensland, Tisdall died in 2004, aged 97, at that time the world’s oldest track and field Olympic gold medallist. And think of how his life journey changed, on the whim of a man sitting at a desk, who read a letter and took a chance on a dreamer.