He Could Run, Obstacles or No

In track and field, the most astonishing upset of the Olympic Games--if you don’t count a Soviet winning the sprints in 1972--is generally conceded to be Billy Mills’ winning of the 10,000 at Tokyo in 1964.

It had its moments. They made a movie about it. Americans aren’t supposed to win any race over 400 meters long and Mills ran 50 seconds--fifty!--faster than he had ever run the distance in his life and set the Olympic record in the process.

Others opt for Lindy Remigino’s winning the 100 at Helsinki in 1952.

But that wasn’t even the greatest sprint upset. It is the notion of this observer that the order of finish in the 1948 100-meter dash was the top upset of all the Olympic Games of all the ages.

“Wait a minute!” the historians want to yell. An American winning a sprint is an upset? Usually, it’s the other way round. An American losing a sprint--or a long jump--is dog-bites-man stuff.

But what if the gold was won by a guy who wasn’t even a sprinter?

That’s exactly what happened at London in 1948.

They called him “Old Bones.” That’s because, if you threw a hat at him, wherever it hit, it would stick. He looked more like a coat rack than a human.

Harrison Dillard was so bony, he rattled when he walked. He sounded like a floating crap game.

He grew up in Cleveland in the shadow of the great Jesse Owens. He went to the same high school, he ran on the same tracks, he had some of the same coaches.

There was only one thing wrong: Bones could run a hole in the wind, too, but he didn’t care for the dashes. Legend has it Bones was not quite quick enough for the 100 and 200, so he switched to the 110-meter hurdles.

Not so, insists Harrison Dillard. He was fast enough for the sprints, all right (as he was to prove). It’s just that he didn’t care for them. Not enough challenge. Hurdling involved technique plus speed. Bones liked the idea of that. He also liked the sensation of flying through the air.

“It was kind of like soaring,” he says. “It was exhilarating.”

He became the most magnificent hurdler, not to say track and field athlete, of his day. He once won 82 races in a row. Not all of them were over timber. He was unbeatable on the flat, too, whenever he switched.

When the Olympic Games were resumed in London after World War II, it was a given that Dillard would lead the United States in the hurdles. He went to the trials in Evanston, Ill., a prohibitive favorite.

No one knows why he did it, but Dillard opted to try out for the 100-meter dash first. It was kind of a lark. The United States had two of the three greatest sprinters in the world at the time--Mel Patton, of USC, who held the world record in the 100 and the 200, and the ebullient Barney Ewell.

Dillard surprised the world by finishing third. He made the boat.

It turned out to be providential. Because, he then shocked the world again by finishing last in his own event. He crashed into eight hurdles, lost his rhythm and lost his race. In those days, you didn’t have the lightweight, easy-topple hurdles of today. You rapped one, it was like hitting a wall. Dillard rapped them all.

It was an all-time shocker. An aghast press computed that Dillard had beaten that same field something like 19 of 20 times he had competed against them. He had set and reset the world record.

His chances for a gold apparently gone glimmering, Dillard nevertheless set about making the best of it.

No one paid much attention to the fact he was turning heats faster than Patton or Ewell--or even the talented Panamanian, Lloyd LaBeach, or the Scot, Alistair McCorquodale. His 10.4s were beating their 10.5s and 10.6s.

“He’ll start to jump 40 yards out,” it was snickered.

Forty yards out, Dillard had blistered into such a lead that the world’s best couldn’t catch him. He not only won--in 10.3--he tied the Olympic record and posted a time that wouldn’t be broken till 1960.

That’s the one of the rare times in modern Olympic history an athlete won a gold medal in an event that wasn’t his, that he hadn’t trained for.

Among other things, it put Dillard on the relay team that got him a gold medal he hadn’t counted on and probably wouldn’t have gotten as a mere hurdler.

They didn’t make a movie about it. They didn’t sing songs about it. But it went into the language. To “pull a Dillard” became to win any event other than the one you enrolled in. Not too many people ever did it.

Dillard returned to his patented hurdle form for the 1952 Olympics, in which he nosed out USC’s Jack Davis, a superb athlete who lost two gold medals in succeeding Olympics while posting the same time as the winner. Dillard also made the relay team again, thanks chiefly to the fact he was a defending gold-medal champion in it.

It was an episode unique in the annals of the games.

Harrison Dillard, today, is the business director of the Cleveland Board of Education and is in Southern California to help with the preparation of the USA/Mobil Track and Field Championships at Cerritos College in Norwalk June 14-16. This is the venerable annual meet of The Athletics Congress, America’s track open, contested every year for the last 115. Among other things, Dillard is the oil company’s athletic adviser.

He won more than 400 races, but he’s most famous for one he didn’t win. It’s arguable that the greatest race he ever won was the race he lost. He has entered the track Hall of Fame; he has an award named after him.

He is a track legend. Because he lost at Evanston that day, he has four gold medals instead of two, and the luckiest thing that ever happened to him was missing those hurdles at Evanston. He must wake up in a cold sweat dreaming he went over all of them and broke the tape. Then, he’d just be another name in a book.