GREAT BRITISH OLYMPIANS

CHRIS BRASHER

The 3,000m steeplechase runner was the ugly duckling who helped others make history. But he wanted some glory for himself, reports David Walsh, Sunday Times

Chris Brasher will be 72 next month, reaching the time in life when each candle must stand for a decade and the grandchildren should be helping him to blow them out. They will know better. For by then his renovated gym will be up and he will be running. The grandkids will come with their trainers.

Sporting fame is an ephemeral blessing: bestowed today, barely remembered tomorrow. His victory in the 3,000m steeplechase at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics is not exactly tattooed onto our consciousness but, in a quirky way, Brasher's story is remarkable.

He remembers the race well enough, although there are no reminders in the house. No trophies, no photos, no hints to his past. "I don't know where the medal is. I could ask Shirley. I think maybe Hugh borrowed it - that's my son."

Somewhere in the library there is a tape of the race. He watched it once, and that was it. So now, with 44 more winters on his back, where does the achievement sit? What did it mean? What does it mean?

"Winning that race was a vital part of my education," he says, leaving you to understand that as a Cambridge graduate, he knows the meaning of education. "In part, it formed my character, it made me believe that if I set my mind to something, I could do it. A man's reach should exceed his grasp and mine always did."

"Oh no, not that old Browning line again," says Shirley as she passes through the room. Shirley Bloomer during her days of eminence on the tennis court but now Shirley Brasher, the former Wimbledon doubles finalist who understands the need to temper his passion with her irreverence. He takes this one on the chin. "Oh, okay," he says, "but there is something I want you to see," he says, turning again to his interviewer, "something that has been central to my life."

Away he goes to the library, returning with a book received as a wedding gift. "It's here," he says thumbing impatiently through the jaundiced pages.

"Yes, got it: 'Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time. Francis Macdonald Cornford'." Brasher laughs heartily, for Cornford struck a chord that has reverberated through his life. Although a long way from needing one, Brasher's epitaph could now be penned: "Here lies a man who in life was a dangerous precedent . . ."

LET us begin with the handicap that came in his infancy, for it is a metaphor for his life. Soon after learning to speak, young Brasher realised he had a tendency to stutter, to seriously st..st..st..stutter. So after colonial years in Guyana (then British Guiana), Baghdad and Jerusalem, he ended up at Oakley Hall prep school near Cirencester. He was se..se..se..seven.

"At morning prayers, all the boys would sit round and the master would get us to start at St John and each fellow would read a paragraph. For days I would be anticipating this, trying to imagine what part I would have to read. It terrified me. I know perfectly the shortest paragraph in the Bible; two words, 'Jesus wept'. I never, ever got it. Anyway, it would have taken me four minutes."

Surf through the years: public school at Rugby, an undergraduate at Cambridge, a geologist with Mobil Oil, a sports journalist with The Observer and a broadcaster with the BBC. The stutter never completely left him, but he controlled it. Only once in his broadcasting career did it slow him down. "I was interviewing the Duke of Windsor about the eminent heart surgeon, Michael DeBakey. The duke had been a patient of Dr DeBakey's, but, in answering my first question, he stuttered. That jolted me back to my youth and I stuttered. The duke thought I was taking the mickey. He was not amused."

The sporting achievement had a similar starting point. He began with a stride no more fluent than his speech. Contemporaries would have said he was "a trier". Give him time and he would get there. But he could never arrive with the class of Roger Bannister or the sustained power of Chris Chataway: "I was a scrubber, somebody who has no bloody talent but just keeps scrubbing away."

The athletics world wouldn't have noticed Brasher if it hadn't been for Bannister. They had become friends during their university days and when Bannister trained his sights on the four-minute mile, Brasher and Chataway were recruited to set the right pace. On a May evening in 1954 at Oxford's Iffley Road track, Brasher and Chataway led Bannister to the brink of immortality, and from there he accelerated.

Bannister said he couldn't have accomplished it without his pacemakers; they had done the donkey work. Chataway would soon establish himself as a middle-distance runner of the highest class, but in the public's mind, Brasher existed only as Bannister's faithful pacemaker.

"As an athlete I felt I was a nonentity, a fraud. Roger had been overly generous in acknowledging what Chris and I had done. My one moment of fame, and I'd achieved it riding on somebody else's back. It made me desperate to show in some other event that it was possible for me to do something."

He reached for something greater than his grasp and convinced himself he could do it in the 3,000m steeplechase. Less fashionable than the mile or the 5,000m, the steeplechase suited those with a never-say-die attitude. Brasher was born for the event. In Franz Stamphl, he had a coach who encouraged his passion and inspired him to dream.

"We would talk about the best runners and their coaches. Stamphl had great time for the Hungarian coach, Igloi, but after meeting with him Franz said that although Igloi was undoubtedly a great coach, he didn't have the ability to make a man go beyond the point at which he thinks he is going to die. If you were prepared to go out and die, Franz was the man to prepare you."

For the 1956 Olympics, Brasher trained like never before. He gave up cigarettes, broke up with his then girlfriend and forsook his favourite outdoor pursuit, mountain-climbing. Freed for 14 months to concentrate on running, his ambition to do well in Melbourne became an obsession.

"I remember getting my Melbourne spikes from Sandy Law, a cobbler in Wimbledon. I stood there as Sandy planed the leather. 'These will only last four races', said Sandy. 'Take more off, Sandy'. And then, 'These will only last two races'. And I said, 'Take more off Sandy, take more'.

"My spikes weighed three and three-quarter ounces, and there were no lighter spikes for 12 years until all the synthetic materials came along. I was determined not to leave anything to chance. I had contact lenses made in case it rained at the time of the race."

Six weeks before the Olympics, Brasher travelled to Australia with his friend Chataway and the Northern Ireland high- jumper Thelma Hopkins. The rest of the Great Britain team would arrive later and have less time to acclimatise. Brasher met up with Stamphl, who had by now moved to Australia, and they worked together in the build-up. He ran 4min 6sec in a mile race at Geelong, his best time for the distance and an indication that his form could not have been better.

Nobody gave Brasher a chance. Rated behind John Disley and Eric Shirley, he was the third member of the team for the steeplechase and fortunate to have earned his place. Britain hadn't won a gold in athletics since 1936, and the drought would surely not end with the steeplechase. Brasher saw it differently. He could finish in the first six, and surely then it wasn't unrealistic to say a top-six man had a medal chance. And who said the medal couldn't be gold?

Not Brasher.

He qualified comfortably for the final, fourth of five qualifiers in the second heat but in a time that suggested he wouldn't be a factor in the final. "The heat gave me the blow-out I needed. It took nothing out of me, just sharpened me for the final. I wanted only to qualify."

On the day before the final, Brasher decided against watching Chataway in the 5,000m final: "Watching Chris would have drained me." Instead he went to the cinema and watched a cowboy film.

Brasher's plan for the final was fixed. He would sprint with 300m to go. Shortly before the race began, Stamphl came to the warm-up track outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground and spoke through the wire fence to his athlete.

"There's a wind out there, leave your sprint until the finishing straight," said the coach. Brasher said it was too late. Embedded in his consciousness, the plan could not be changed.

Before the starter sounded the gun, Disley turned to Brasher: "Chris, if I don't win, I hope you do." Not fully recovered from an earlier illness, Disley was short of his best and even though he wished his friend well, he didn't seriously believe Brasher would do it. But the scrubber ran the race precisely as he intended and was just behind the Hungarian Sandor Rozsnyoi as the bell sounded.

With 300m left, Brasher moved to the outside of Rozsnyoi and sprinted. Further out the Norwegian Ernst Larsen was slightly clipped by Brasher as he cleared the fourth-last hurdle. Larsen did not lose ground. As Brasher surged, the gap between him and Rozsnyoi widened.

In that part of the stand where journalists watched the race Terry O'Connor, representing the London Evening News, jumped to his feet and yelled: "No, no, no, not Brasher, no no!" Many shared O'Connor's incredulity. Not that far away, Chataway watched his friend fly away. "How does he do it? How does he do it? Those last two laps . . ." Alongside Chataway sat Bannister, covering the Games for The Sunday Times. "His legs don't look great," said Bannister, "but then they never looked good."

Clear of Rozsnyoi and Larsen, Brasher kept going. He sensed he only had to clear the last hurdle. "I glanced over my right shoulder and then screamed at myself, 'You've done it, you've done it, you've done it'."

Disley notes: "Of the threesome, Bannister, Chataway and Brasher, Chris was the ugly duckling and the only one to win an Olympic gold"

Not that it came without a twist. As Brasher walked back to the start to collect his tracksuit, he heard the result called: first, Rozsnyoi; second, Larsen; third, Heinz Laufer. "They got the result wrong," he said to an official. "What's your name? Brasher is it? You've been disqualified." Brasher went straight to the appeal jury and protested.

The jury would not meet until that evening's competition had concluded.

Brasher sat with Rozsnyoi, Larsen and Laufer in the changing room. A Hungarian, a Norwegian, a German and an Englishman all speaking different languages but communicating in the way sportsmen can. Rozsnyoi said he didn't care much about the jury's decision, his thoughts were with his wife and children from whom he had not heard since Soviet tanks had moved into Hungary.

Larsen told Brasher he had won fairly and the result should not be changed. Fourth-placed Laufer said he would throw the bronze at officials if he was promoted to third. "In those days," says Brasher, "nobody had shoe contracts and athletes could say exactly what they felt."

But the athletes are only athletes. The officials would decide. Brasher worried as he had never worried before: "I spoke to the press and wore a towel around my head, like boxers sometimes do. The reason I wore the towel was because I was damn near crying." At the end of the evening the jury reinstated Brasher.

The gold medal was rightfully his.

He returned to his career as broadcaster and sports writer. It didn't end there. Brasher saw the potential for a London marathon, went into partnership with his friend Disley, and created the world's best marathon. They set up businesses; a running-shoe company made both millionaires.

In an investigation of the relationship between that business and the London Marathon, Channel 4 made allegations of malpractice. The old runners got their spikes on and when the case was settled, Channel 4 was £2m poorer; £380,000 awarded jointly to Brasher and Disley, and costs that were more than four times greater.

Brasher used some of the money to treat himself to a racehorse. The nicest horse he has owned is a finely built and even-tempered chestnut.

He called it Dangerous Precedent.