Glory days on the grass track

It has witnessed some epic moments in track and field, but now, athletics on the soft grass track at Trafalgar Park is almost history. As Greg Lautenslager writes, the memories will last. 

Rod Dixon stood on the starting line at Munich's Olympic Stadium amid nine other finalists in the 1972 1500-metres final, 80,000 spectators, and television cameras sending the race to millions of viewers around the world and all he could think about was Trafalgar Park.

"I closed my eyes and thought about all the laps in training I ran around that track, all the races, and everything I had done to prepare myself for this moment," Dixon says. He was half the globe away from his native Nelson, but in his thoughts he was home. Trafalgar Park is where it started, where he gained his inspiration to become a great runner, won his first medal, trained almost daily with his brother John, nearly first broke four minutes in the mile, and recorded some of the greatest memories of his life.

Without running on the soft grass track of Trafalgar Park, Dixon would never have captured an Olympic bronze medal that day in Munich or won the 1983 New York City Marathon, or so many other international races. "Trafalgar Park," says Dixon, who turns 60 this year, "was the cornerstone of my athletic career."

Dixon is one of thousands of athletes whose memories will be left behind when athletics moves out of Trafalgar Park later this month. A new all-weather track has been laid at Saxton Field and new memories and new athletes will emerge from the rubber oval and runways. No longer heard from Trafalgar Park will be the trampling of runners around the bends and down the straights, grunts of javelin and discus throwers hoisting their implements into the infield, and jumpers leaping skyward and landing into a sand pit or a foam mat. The roars that once echoed from the old wooden stands to the surrounding hills during athletics meets in three centuries will vanish into the wind blowing from the nearby sea; the white lines around the 10-lane track will disappear.

"It's sad to see it go," says Dave Dawber, Athletics Nelson's club historian who competed at Trafalgar Park in the 1960s. "There were so many great meets there and many of the greatest athletes in the world." The first athletics meets were held in the late 19th century when Trafalgar Park was nothing but a park. There were no stands or buildings, the sea came right to the edge of the park, and the river ran through it.

Records show that an athletics and cycling club was formed in 1880 and an amateur club formed in 1895, not long before the first modern Olympics in Athens, Greece. Athletics and cycling meets were held until the club went into recess in the early 1920s.

A public meeting was held in 1927 to form the Amateur Athletic and Cycling Club and that year four meets at Trafalgar Park were held, one arranged to coincide with a visit by the duke and duchess of York, and the last that attracted a large attendance on Easter Saturday with a large team coming from Wellington. Eight-time New Zealand champion Randolph Rose ran 9min 20.2secs to break the national two-mile record by five seconds.

Great meets at Trafalgar Park soon followed and included the interclub Mahar Cup, which started in 1932 and featured clubs from Marlborough to the West Coast, and the Hester Shield, between Nelson and Marlborough that began in 1936. These meets are still held, but not with the attention they once had.

Through the 1950s and 1960s athletes were selected to compete for their clubs and many athletes were turned away. Spectators filled the Trafalgar Park grandstand and yelled loudly during the athletics competitions and cycling events, which were in those days held in conjunction with the Mahar Cup and Hester Shield on the cycling track that circled the running track. At first there was only one stand on the west side, where the start-finish line was, and the 100 metres was run down the centre of the field.

Barry Hunt first came to Nelson as a teenager from Reefton in 1949 and tried to use a quick-fingered starter to get a jump on top sprinter Reg Warren in the 100-yard dash at the 1951 Mahar Cup. "I went as soon as the starter said, `Set'," Hunt says. "I jumped right at the gun. But Reg still beat me by 10 yards."

Betty Tutty enjoyed the competitions and the Wednesday club nights for the social aspect. She and her husband, Maurice, moved to Nelson from Ashburton in 1949. Betty would go to Trafalgar Park after a day's work in the dressmaking department at McKay's, do some running and jumping, and then go with her fellow competitors for a milkshake in town.

"It was a great release and I made a lot of friends," says Tutty, 79, who still has award certificates and photos from that era and lives a few blocks from Trafalgar Park.

Tutty's greatest moment was running against 100 and 200-yards world record holder and 1950 Empire Games champion Marjorie Jackson of Australia in a meet at Trafalgar Park.

In the second half of the century, Trafalgar Park played host to some of the biggest meets in the country. On January 11, 1958, Neville Scott of Auckland ran 4min 6.6sec before 2000 spectators who crammed into the new eastern wooden stand at the City of Nelson Centenary Mile ahead of runner-up Murray Halberg, who would win the 5000m at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In third place was four-time national cross country and steeplechase champion Kerry Williams, who would return the next year to teach at Nelson College and coach athletes at Trafalgar Park. He and George Griffith played a big part in keeping the children's athletics going.

On January 5, 1963, Halberg returned to run a leg of the four-mile relay with his Arthur Lydiard-coached team-mates Bill Baillie, Olympic bronze medallist John Davies and three-time Olympic champion Peter Snell. They were matched against the University of Oregon's world-record team. The two teams battled to the final home stretch where Snell overtook Keith Forman to bring New Zealand home with a 4min 2sec anchor leg for a winning time of 16min 29.2sec, 20.3sec outside the world record.

A roaring crowd of 12,000 packed the grandstand and sat several rows deep around the track. It included the 14-year-old Rod Dixon.

 

Dixon had first come to the park as a seven-year-old schoolboy, so overwhelmed by the enormity of Trafalgar Park that he was left behind in the 100m and humiliated by a long-jump official.

``What's wrong with you? Can't even reach the pit,'' the woman yelled. ``Get on your bike and ride home.''

Seven years later, Dixon bought his ticket from a trousers shop in town, sat at the head of the home straight, and watched the world-class runners roar around the grass track in their all-black track suits in the four-mile relay in 1963.

``That was the defining moment, when I knew I wanted to wear the New Zealand singlet,'' he says.

Eight years later, the crowd assembled on February 17, 1971, to watch Dixon try to become the first to break four minutes at Trafalgar Park. John Dixon pushed the pace through the halfway mark, and Rod was on pace and on the shoulder of Dick Tayler as they passed three laps in three minutes flat.

Tayler surged to victory in 3min 59.1sec, and Rod Dixon was second in 4min 2.2sec. Both runners went on to greater glory  - Tayler winning the 10,000m at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch and Dixon at the Olympics and setting many records in Europe and the United States.

On his first plane trip out of Nelson, John Dixon, who trained his brother, pointed to Trafalgar Park from the plane window: ``Remember all those workouts and races you ran there to get you to this point.''

Rod ran his share of Mahar Cups and Hester Shields, and against such friendly rivals as Roger Sowman and a challenge race against a local rugby team, whom he had called lazy. Dixon ran 15 laps, and 15 rugby players each ran one lap on a relay. Dixon stayed in contact until four laps to go, when team captain Terry Julian ran a 53-second lap to break the race open. Dixon closed the gap on the last three laps but could not catch the rugby team.

Many other great runners competed at Trafalgar Park, including Australians Ralph Doubell, the 1968 Olympic 800m champion, and Judy Pollock, 400m bronze medallist in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and world record holder at 440 yards, at an international meet in January of 1966. Pollock broke the New Zealand women's 440 open record in that meet by running 53.5sec.

Eleven years later, in the third meeting of an international series in January of 1977, the 1976 Olympic champion John Walker was merely mentioned after winning a tactical 1500m over West Germans Karl Fleschen and Detlief Uhleman. Australia's Raelene Boyle, the three-time Olympic silver medallist, defeated Olympic champion Irena Szewinska of Poland in the 100m and 200m. Nelson's Peter Pearless ran 47.6sec to break the national junior record of record-holder Warren McCallum, who finished six metres behind.

Australia's Gerard Barrett upset Olympic medallists Dick Quax,  Klaus-Peter Hildenbrand and Bronislaw Malinowski to win the two-mile in 8min 37.6sec. The final sentence of the newspaper story read: ``There was a disappointing crowd of 4000.''

Likely in the stands or on the field with a stopwatch at all those big meets was Jim Sharland. Except for a 10-year stint in Marlborough, Sharland spent much of his time at Trafalgar Park until his death in July, 2004. He competed in several events from 1949 to 1984 and in 2003, at age 72, finished third in the hammer throw at the South Island Masters Track and Field Championships at Trafalgar Park.

He coached athletes, presided over Athletics Nelson and the Tasman Centre, produced results for the newspaper and the radio, started races and officiated at meets. Every Wednesday he put the flags around the track and set up the speaker system to make his first call for the events at club night. And always with a wry, little smile.

``At times I thought he was married to the track,'' says his wife, Maureen.

At one workout, Sharland stood on the starting line and told a runner he'd race him to the 300m mark. As the runner tore around the first turn, Sharland ran 100m in the opposite direction and beat him to the mark. He bet another runner he couldn't run 67 seconds for 400m, and shrugged him off with a laugh after his 57.4: ``I won the bet; you ran 57, not 67.''

After Sharland died, one Athletics Nelson official said, ``I didn't realise how much Jim did until I had to do it.''

Like Sharland, many individuals have been coming and returning to Trafalgar Park. Graham Talbot, who lives down the street from Trafalgar  Park, ran 1min 57.6sec on that track to break the 800m Mahar Cup record in 1956. Fifty years later he watched Julian Matthews break his record.

Cliff Saxton started coming to Trafalgar Park as a Nelson College schoolboy in 1953 and continued sprinting, throwing and jumping for several years  - often hitching a ride with a fellow competitor back home to Richmond late after a meet. He lost interest in competing but not in the track, which he has surveyed at the start of the season for 50 years. All the marks and staggers for the various events are his.

``It's my way of putting something back,'' says Saxton, 74, whose children and grandchildren have also competed at Trafalgar Park.

Barry Hunt came to Nelson in 1995 after a career as a bank manager and developing many national champion sprinters and serving as a selector and the president of Athletics New Zealand. His first stop was Trafalgar Park, where he continued coaching and helped revive athletics in Nelson, where the likes of Olympic 800m runner Toni Hodgkinson and world cross-country runner Jacqui Goodman had set their share of club records and left to train elsewhere. He and his wife, Mavis, have served as timers for the well-attended school meets like the Nelson College for Girls house athletics, the Nelson-Marlborough and South Island secondary school championships, masters' competitions and the Special Olympics. Last Monday Hunt, 77, was out at Trafalgar Park putting his two junior sprinters through a track workout.

In 1998 Hunt did a feasibility study and then raised several hundred thousand dollars in pledges to put in an all-weather track at Trafalgar Park. But he said rugby officials  decided they didn't want the all-weather track.

In 2006, after the Nelson city and Tasman district councils agreed to put a million dollars toward an all-weather track at Saxton Field and almost to his chagrin, Grant Hunt (no  relation to Barry) became the project manager to the new facility. Grant had wanted athletics to remain at Trafalgar Park but realised it wasn't feasible with all the other sports and activities competing for space at Trafalgar Park.

He first came to the track as a 10-year-old after his mother bet him a dollar he couldn't win all the events at the children's meet. His mother pointed to Cleve Worthington and said: ``That's the boy you've got to beat.

 

``I looked out over Trafalgar Park and was struck by the clipped lawn and all the white lines on the track,'' says Grant, who won his dollar and has come back to the track almost every week for the past 30 years.

He ran 1min 52.5sec for 800m at age 16 and held junior records for many years. He coached several top junior middle distance runners  - including Guy, Josh, and Jamie Barber and Tom Heaphy  - and was the chairman of the Athletics Nelson senior and then children's sections. He directed the 2007 Colgate Games, the fourth Colgate Games held at Trafalgar Park, and has two very fast sons, who compete on that track.

Probably no one has been coming to the track longer than Harold Nelson, 85, the 1948 Olympian and 1950 Empire Games six-mile champion. He came to teach at Nelson College in 1951 and coached many top sprinters and runners at Trafalgar Park and helped keep the club going, no matter what adversity has faced him.

In 1988, he suffered a stroke. In 2006 he lost Joyce, his beloved wife of 57 years, to Alzheimer's disease. Not long after that, he fell down stairs at  a holiday house near Timaru and spent six weeks in hospital recovering from broken ribs, broken collarbone and a punctured lung.

Despite all that, every Athletics Nelson club night and every Hester Shield and Mahar Cup meeting and so many children's and school meets, Nelson is there with a stopwatch to time the first person across the line.

Dixon, who has a house in Nelson but spends most of his time in California, returned to Trafalgar Park 12 months ago and helped out at the Mahar Cup. He raked the long jump pit during the competition and stood in the rain and looked around at empty grandstands on both sides of the track and the dwindling number of competitors. More popular sports, like triathlon, road racing, multisports, field hockey and soccer have soaked up keen athletes from an era when athletics was king, and top national and international meets have been swayed to the all-weather surfaces.

``I almost cried when I saw that,'' Dixon says.

He smiled when Nelson's Dallas Bowden, the 11-time national junior champion and 16 and under national record holder at the 1500m, whipped past West Coast's Josh Komen in the home stretch to win the 800m. Bowden has led a new breed of stars, like Dominic Channon, Julian Matthews, Mandy Russ, Alex Jordan and Hazel Bowering-Scott, who have emerged from Trafalgar Park and into the national spotlight.

They, like their forerunners, will leave Trafalgar Park but not without the memories of life on the soft grass track. 

- © Fairfax NZ News