Athletics: Hill bemoans dearth of commitment to marathon

Ultimate long-distance runner rues missed chance to tell young athletes that victory and not money is a real reward for personal sacrifice

Around about the time Britain's only competitor in the World Championships' men's marathon was tailing off and dropping out - and 24 hours before our sole entry in the women's event, the brave but outgunned 35-year-old Jo Lodge, was slogging home in 39th place - a BBC interviewer invited Ron Hill to sell the classic race to the nation's youth.

There was a terrible pause and when the answer came it was scarcely a surprise.

Hill, a European and Commonwealth Games champion in the Seventies, said he couldn't do it. How could he sell the kind of self-sacrifice it takes to run up to 20 miles for, as of yesterday, 14,088 consecutive days, in an age of image rights and instant celebrity, when a ballyhooed young sprint star like Dwain Chambers walks around trackside with a bottle of champagne in his hand after blowing not one gold but two?

"When I was young," Hill said, "I ran for medals and records and that was enough in itself. It was a different age, of course. You ran for the glory. Money didn't come into it, which was just as well because there wasn't too much of it about. Urging kids to run the marathon today, it seems to me, would be a very hard sell."

After 48 hours of reflection, Hill regretted that gut reaction which went nationwide when I spoke to him yesterday. "When I thought about it, I realised I could and should have made a case for running the marathon," Hill says.

"I could have talked about the extraordinary exhilaration when you work your way to full fitness, when you realise that you have done all you can to win, and then when you do win, that feeling of satisfaction is certainly the greatest sensation I've ever had in my life. To be honest, I've been feeling a little bit disappointed recently. Not bitter, but disappointed."

The sense of lost glory in this country for the event which has dominated so much of his life was compounded the other day when he saw how the French organisers of the World Championships had honoured their old Olympic marathon gold winner Alan Mimoun, who deposed the great reigning champion Emil Zatopek in Melbourne in 1956. Mimoun did a lap of the Stade de France - and provided a little relief from the latest drugs controversy surrounding the gold-winning American sprinter Kelli White. Mimoun ran, slightly embarrassed, through the swagger and the posturing of an age which for him, as for Hill, is increasingly unfamiliar.

"Given that Manchester is my home town, I was a little disappointed not to get an invitation to the last Commonwealth Games," Hill says. "They could have invited three former champions, Ian Thompson, Brian Kilby and me - and that might have pointed out to the youngsters that we have a good tradition in a great event."

Chambers' champagne celebration in Paris, which came after he surrendered the lead in the final leg of the 4x100 meters, might have been happening on another planet. When Hill, a strong favourite for the 1972 Olympic gold in Munich, finished sixth behind the American Frank Shorter, he would have taken champagne only intravenously after first being hit on the head with a blunt instrument.

Before coming down to Munich, he was running in the Alps, putting in between 120 and 140 miles a week and at the same time pushing on with his experiments in glycogen-loading, which was a form of Atkins diet on the hoof. A textile chemist, Hill recalls: "I thought of myself as a scientist runner, and in the race I wore a silver vest and shorts believing that would do most to resist the effects of the sun. I also had a pair of gold shorts in my bag for the medal ceremony. I'd got tired in the Alps but I thought it would all come right when I got down to Munich."

Maybe, he muses, flames of ambition might again be fanned in young Britons when they think of the challenge of running long and lonely.

Certainly the desire is not so long dead despite Britain's token effort in Paris. In 1985, Steve Jones held the world record and Charlie Spedding was a formidable performer. Richard Nerurkar, who went off to train with the Kenyans, won a World Cup marathon in San Sebastian 10 years ago - the same year Eamonn Martin won the London marathon. Paul Evans won the Chicago marathon in 1996 and three years ago at the Olympic Games in Sydney John Brown finished fourth. "And of course," says Hill, "there is Paula Radcliffe, who is an example of courage to any young British runner. Yes, I could have cited her when I was asked to sell the marathon."

It was still, however, an eloquent pause. It spoke of a fear provoked by British attitudes in Paris, when shrugs and champagne seemed inappropriate responses to a place in the medals table below St Kitts and Lithuania, Mozambique and the Dominican Republic. Hill's nagging fear is a lost appetite to do the work and cover the ground.

For the record, he ran a mere two and a half miles yesterday. But then, as he was quick to point out, he is suffering from a virus and this year he collects his bus pass.