Larrabee’s Career Was Fun and the Olympic Games

Mike Larrabee’s track and field career was a testament to the power of perseverance.

Larrabee, 66, never placed higher than fifth in either the state championships-- while he was at Ventura High--or in the NCAA championships-- while he was at USC--yet he won gold medals in the 400 meters and the 1,600 relay in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

He became the oldest man--30 years, 322 days--to win the Olympic 400 and he is the last white American to win an Olympic sprint event.

Ventura High renamed its track and football stadium after him in 1965.

“I never expected to run as long as I did,” Larrabee told The Times in 1989. “It just kind of happened. I always took it meet by meet and year by year. I never had any master plan.

“But anyone who knew me would tell you that I loved to play. . . . Track was play to me. It was fun. It was a big part of my social life. I really enjoyed running for the 1/8Southern California 3/8 Striders. They were one of the big clubs and I had a good time with them.”

Having a good time has always been a requirement in Larrabee’s life.

The 1952 Ventura graduate has been an avid hiker for 30 years, scaling mountains throughout the world, including Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina, at 22,835 feet the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere.

Larrabee was a master of the outrageous in his college days.

Warren Farlow, an undergraduate at USC from 1958-62 and a half-miler on the track team, said in 1989 that Larrabee was a legend on campus for his pranks and social life.

“The guy was close to insane,” Farlow said. “He was the original animal-house character. He lived the college life to the fullest. He was a maniac. Even when he got married 1/8in 1956 3/8 and started raising kids, he was as crazy as could be.”

Farlow, co-coach at Kennedy High from 1972-95, said he could tell Larrabee stories all day. One of his favorites was the time Larrabee and some buddies secretly rigged up a speaker system in the neighborhood around USC, then blasted sound-effects records at 3 a.m.

“They terrorized that neighborhood on and off for about a year,” Farlow said. “It would be in the middle of the night, and suddenly, these people are startled awake by 1/8crazy 3/8 noises in the middle of Los Angeles.”

Underneath all the craziness was a very competitive person, said Farlow and Bill Toomey, 1968 Olympic decathlon champion.

“He was one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen,” said Farlow, who taught with Larrabee at Monroe High from 1963-68. “He was very intense in workouts, but he always had a good time doing it. The guy could have been an exceptional half-miler if he had wanted to be.”

Toomey said Larrabee helped him become a great 400 runner, a decathlete who ran 45.6 in that event.

“He had a lot of street smarts about how to compete against others,” Toomey said. “He taught me the intricacies of all-out 1/8300-meter sprints 3/8. He taught me that you couldn’t run all-out in races if you never did in workouts.”

Larrabee reached the pinnacle of the track world with his Olympic victory in 1964, but his journey was long, bumpy and often painful.

He went to USC on scholarship after placing fifth in the 220-yard dash in the 1952 state championships, but the 400 meters became his specialty in college.

He ran 49.0 as a freshman and steadily improved. As a senior, he ran 46.2 and placed eighth in the Olympic trials while running with the flu.

Larrabee was ranked second in the world in 1957 after lowering his best time to 46.0 while running for the Striders, but he severely strained his right hamstring during a 200 race midway through the season.

The injury was originally thought to be a career-ending one, but it gradually improved and Larrabee ran again in 1958 and was ranked sixth in the world in 1959.

He was undefeated during the early part of 1960, but he ruptured his right Achilles’ tendon in a workout a few days after defeating a top-flight field--including soon-to-be-crowned Olympic champion Otis Davis--in the Compton Invitational at the Coliseum.

The Achilles’ tendon injury was also thought to be career-ending, but Larrabee managed to run with it for three years. His Achilles’ tendon improved noticeably in the fall of 1963 and he began to incorporate 10-mile runs into his training regimen.

He was “strong as an ox” at the start of the 1964 season, according to Farlow, and he needed the strength to overcome a case of pancreatitis--an inflammation of the pancreas--in the spring.

A 102-degree temperature limited him to a sixth-place time of 46.6 in the first Olympic trials race in Randalls Islands, N.Y., in July, but he won the second trials race with a 44.9 effort that tied the world record at the Coliseum two months later.

He won the Olympic final in 45.1 on Oct. 19, passing leader Wendell Mottley of Trinidad and Tobago with 10 meters left after being in sixth place after 200 meters and in fifth after 300.

” 1/8That victory 3/8 meant a lot to me inside because of what happened in ‘56--when I had the flu--and ‘60--when I injured my Achilles’,” Larrabee said. “It was something that I had been shooting for for a long time. But I never did it for the glory.

“In fact, I ditched a parade in Fillmore for me after the Games.”

Although he enjoyed teaching, Larrabee moved with his wife and three children to Santa Maria in 1968 to take over his mother’s beer distributorship with his brother Terry.

He missed teaching, but said the financial rewards in the beer business were substantially greater.

The business, which he and his brother still run, also allowed him more leisure time, much of which he spent hiking and backpacking.

He began raising llamas in 1985 to use as pack animals, and he added what he describes as low-level rock climbing to his repertoire of outdoor activities in the late 1980s.

None of which surprised Toomey, who said Larrabee has always lived life to the fullest.

“Today, they make a lot of money in track,” Toomey said. “They’re rich in dollars. But back then, track was rich in character. And he was probably as Shakespearean as anyone in that cast.”