Irish runners still chasing Eamonn Coghlan’s enduring mile masterpiece 40 years on

Where does the time go. But some fragments of memory not lost to decay are still easily pieced together, and quickly came to mind with Eamonn Coghlan’s own little reminder of that tragic event and fate which followed already 40 years ago this week.

This was a time when any young or aspiring runner in this country would wake up at the weekend and search out some news of the American indoor circuit: the Millrose Games, the Vitalis Invitational, the Maple Leaf meeting in Toronto, we knew them all by heart and Lord knows how we got the news back then, but we did.

[ Coghlan's 'redemption day' in Helsinki ]

Coghlan, we knew too, was already the Chairman of the Boards, setting a world indoor mile record not once but twice, running 3:52.6 in San Diego in February of 1979, before improving that to 3:50.6 in February of 1981. By then he’d also won the Wanamaker Mile five times, the headline act at the Millrose Games named after the famed New York department store and running inside the old and then new Madison Square Garden since 1912.

That latest Wanamaker victory, 11 laps to the mile on the creaky wooden boards, came on the last Saturday in January 1983, in 3:53-flat, and in attendance at the Garden that night was Coghlan’s father Bill. He’d travelled out to Coghlan’s home in Rye, the coastal suburb of New York City, with the plan to stay around to watch Coghlan’s attempt on his own mile world record two weeks later, at the US Olympic Invitational in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

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Two years previously, Coghlan’s adored coach Jumbo Elliott at Villanova had died suddenly, and he had turned to his father Bill, a former president of the Irish athletics federation BLE, for more of that moral and spiritual support.

Coghlan had another race lined up for the Friday, only on the Tuesday morning, February 1st, he returned from a morning run around his home in Rye to find his father hadn’t awoken. He went upstairs and discovered he’d died in his sleep. He was 63 years old, leaving behind his wife Catherine and three sons and two daughters.

My father often told me the story about being at the funeral back in Dublin about a week later. “So what are you going to do now,” he gently asked, assuming Coghlan would say his 1983 indoor season was finished, not realising his mother had already helped convinced him otherwise.

“I’m going back to America to break the world record for the man in that coffin,” Coghlan replied.

On the indoor track, Coghlan’s 3:49.78 mile is the longest standing Irish indoor running record by some considerable distance

Here’s where fate intervened: the US Olympic Invitational was scheduled for February 12th, only that got cancelled because of a major snowstorm that shut down most of New York. Through a combination of fortune and good deed, an alternative date was set for February 27th, Coghlan promising CBS TV he wouldn’t disappoint if they wanted to carry the Vitalis Mile live, and he didn’t, his 3:49.78 world record shown across the US.

It was and still is an Irish mile masterpiece, Coghlan, just three-and-a-half weeks after his father’s death, utterly ripping up the 10 laps of the Byrne Arena with only one thing on his mind. In his all-green kit and Discover Ireland logo across his vest, he jumped straight on to the heels of the pacemaker Ross Donohue, also of Villanova stock, before kicking to the front shortly after hitting halfway in 1:55.5. You do the math from there – his 3:49.78 the first sub-3:50 mile in indoor history, lasting 14 years as the world record before Hicham El Guerrouj eventually broke it with his 3:48.45.

It’s easy to mainline the nostalgia of this golden era of Irish indoor running, Ray Flynn and Marcus O’Sullivan, then Niall Bruton and Mark Carroll, other winners of the Wanamaker Mile, who along with Coghlan won it 19 times between them, helping to sell out Madison Square Garden long before Katie Taylor or Conor McGregor ever did.

As did Ronnie Delany before that, who like Coghlan broke the world indoor mile record three times, lowering it to 4:03.4 in Chicago in 1958, then to 4:02.5 and again to 4:01.4 at the Knights of Columbus Games at the Garden in 1959. Indeed when Delany made the cover of Sports Illustrated in February 1959, three years after winning his Olympic 1,500m gold medal, it was namely for extending his four-year unbeaten indoor streak to 40 races, including 33 over the mile.

Such is this lasting impact and enduring history, the mile is the only imperial distance which World Athletics retains on its standard world record lists, indoors and out.

On the indoor track, Coghlan’s 3:49.78 mile is the longest standing Irish indoor running record by some considerable distance, only not as long as the triple jump record, which has stood to Colm Cronin since 1978. Given all the improvements in track surfaces and construction, coupled with the more modern super-spikes known to offer a whatever slight running advantage, Coghlan’s record looks ever more impressive 40 years on.

How much longer will it last? Geoff Burns, a sports scientist and engineer at the University of Michigan, last year produced a 5,000-word paper on the physics of indoor track and optimal surfaces, praising the plywood construction of the older tracks such as the Garden, and their asymmetric banking, which rose more aggressively early in the turn, favoured by track designer Floyd Highfill.

The 2023 American indoor circuit gathers real pace this Saturday at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, staged for the first time at the purpose-built indoor track facility at the company’s world headquarters in the Boston neighbourhood of Brighton. The track certainly looks spanking fast, and will get one of its first proper test runs with the Tommy Leonard Memorial Men’s Mile – Leonard once the face and voice of the Massachusetts running scene.

Last weekend, on an over-sized 300m indoor track in Seattle, Brian Fay ran 3:52.03, the fastest mile by an Irishman in 20 years, and Andrew Coscoran and Luke McCann will both start the mile in Boston. Last year, Coscoran ran 3:53.64 indoors, McCann 3:53.87, the sixth and seventh fastest Irishmen in history. Times may be improving, the tracks and training and everything else too, still it seems they’re some distance off Coghlan’s enduring mile masterpiece.