ABC: How Rob De Castella changed the face of the marathon and bounced back from his Los Angeles Olympics disappointment
By Paul Kennedy
Rob De Castella battles through the heat and the smog during the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.(Getty Images)
I have posted this article today to honour the Olympic Marathon, which is programmed today in Paris. In addition, this is a tribute to a friend ‘Deeks” as we called him at school. I ran many times with him up and down the hills around Kew in the early ‘70s. Finally, this is a tribute to my coach Pat Clohessy who gave so much of his time to me, and many others, helping them achieve their best. Its because of Pat I still go for a run everyday I can.
Its a well written piece on a time in history I treasure.
"The marathon starts at 30km — the first 30 is your warm up."
Rob de Castella is giving his annual pre-race speech at Australia's premier marathon on the Gold Coast, each of his sentences rising and crashing like breaking surf.
"The marathon is the last 12km — the marathon starts when it gets hard, and hard is good. Hard tests you," he says.
Some of the runners are nodding at the words from the 67-year-old in the tower. Others are smiling.
All are listening.
"It tests your body, it tests your mind," he says.
"And it tests your spirit and your courage."
Briefly, he pauses his oration to allow this idea to settle before the denouement.
"We salute your courage. Embrace the struggle," he says.
De Castella then watches in admiration as the competitors jump at the gun, press start on their smart watches, and stride into the half lit morning toward their own reckoning.
A strange and wonderful beast is running in the bush
In 1984, Sports Illustrated writer Kenny Moore packed runners in his suitcase and flew Down Under to write a story about the marathon's first official world champion.
American sports journalists and athletics fans everywhere were fascinated by Rob de Castella, or 'Deek', who was burly as a footballer, but somehow ran faster for longer than all the finely built distance warriors.
"Eventually it penetrates that here is a remarkably formed beast," Moore noted after jogging with de Castella through Stromlo Forest, south-west of Canberra.
"He seems out of proportion, with heavily muscled legs supporting a taut, wiry upper body, as if halves of two different men have been joined at the waist."
But Moore, being not only a writer but also a former Olympic marathon runner, was even more intrigued by de Castella's confounding calmness.
What was his mind saying while he was training two times a day, 220km every week, and hammering out so many races without ever losing his composure?
"To find out," Moore wrote, invoking the third person, "the visitor must first break through de Castella's reluctance to be questioned."
He persisted and got some good quotes. De Castella's deep thinking about racing has always been interesting.
Then the Australian opened up to Moore about being favourite to win gold at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
"It's harder if everyone thinks you're going to win," de Castella said.
"It's almost unfair that the desires of millions of people you don't know can intrude upon your sanctuary. They believe that you, the athlete, are representing them, and you have an obligation to win. If you lose, they feel embarrassed, as if you're showing their weakness, don't you think?"
The athlete was not complaining — he called high public expectations "part of the challenge."
"I've always admired emotional control in people," he said.
Moore's story, A Man Wreathed in Glory, hit the magazine shelves a few weeks before the Olympics.
By then De Castella had flown to California to acclimatise and finish his Olympic preparations.
Back home, all sports loving Australians, like their hero 'Norm' from the Life Be In It commercials, settled into their arm chairs to watch the Games.
Aussies had never known a countryman to be fancied in the marathon, just as they had never known an Australian boat to win the America's Cup, which was accomplished a year earlier.
Anything seemed possible in the '80s.
Previewing the men's marathon, The New York Times wrote of de Castella: "Undefeated in his last four marathons dating to 1980, and marathon winner at the world championships, the 27-year-old Australian is the clear favourite. His personal best 2 hours 8 minutes 18 seconds is the second fastest in history, and he has been working to improve his speed to go with his formidable strength. He has lowered his 10,000m to 27:48, the second-best such time in history."
Yet the great de Castella did not win in Los Angeles.
Forty years later, on the eve of another Olympic Games, another writer asks him to talk about the 1984 marathon and what it means to him after all these years.
What is the difference between winning and not winning over a long career? What is the price of gold to the world's best?
"I don't like talking about Los Angeles," he says, before offering a short laugh to assuage any awkwardness.
"No, that's OK. It's a good question."
The short history of a marathon champion
Look at the lives of champions in sport and you will almost always find they were raised with encouragement and praise, a combination of gifts that can produce eternal self-belief.
So it was with de Castella, one of seven children raised by parents Rolet and Ann in Melbourne.
De Castella's pride in family goes back to the 1800s; his great grandfather came to Australia from the Swiss district of Gruyeres.
"I'm the eldest son of the eldest son going back many generations, and we were about family," he explains.
"We were made to feel very special."
His father, a keen runner, urged him to pound the pavement in suburban Kew.
First the boy hated it, then he liked it, graduating to school cross country races under the guidance of his teacher Pat Clohessy, a former middle distance runner.
Clohessy would coach de Castella his entire career.
"He was a great athlete," de Castella once said of his mentor.
"He's not a technician by a scientific definition, but he's an artist in terms of he understands what is required to develop mastery."
Just as teenager de Castella was building strength and consistency through training, his father, aged 49, had a heart attack at the kitchen table.
Rolet de Castella survived, recovered, and began championing a healthier lifestyle.
Seven years later, in 1979, Rob ran his first marathon in the Victorian Championships, on the same day his dad ran his first post-heart attack marathon.
"It was a nice family thing," he explains.
"I remember Mum being down there and worrying that he was going to die halfway through the seniors race."
Up until now, de Castella had been an eye-catching cross country runner and 10,000m aspirant.
But he wanted to represent Australia at the Olympics in Moscow and reckoned his best chance was in the marathon.
He won the Australian Championships (2:13:23) and finished second at the Olympic selection trials (2:12:24); his racing tactic — to begin unhurried and storm home — was already paying off.
"Back in those days there was a respect that we had for the marathon," he says.
"These days, the marathon from the gun is a sprint."
His first Games, in 1980, was relatively successful; he finished 10th (2:14:31) behind twice gold medallist East German Waldemar Cierpinski.
Thereafter he looked to enter his first big city race.
He finished eighth in Fukuoka.
All of sudden, he was world class.
He would not lose another marathon for three years.
"It's important that success has to sit comfortably with you," he says, looking back at the beginning of his international career.
"You've got to feel entitled or destined to be successful and I think that was one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me, that belief that I was special and I was destined to do something really significant."
The Australian "big fella" stares down the American star Salazar
It was becoming apparent by 1981 the powerful De Castella had another, less obvious, physical advantage over his competitors — he was durable.
A long list of national middle distance events and world cross country championships never wore him down, therefore he never got injured and his continuity of training was ideal.
This was complemented by his psychology.
"A little bit mystical, spiritual," he says.
"I think the marathon appeals to that element. Even going back to Philippides (the Greek man who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC) and the history of the event.
"The event allows you to tap into something special within yourself, whether it's the last five k or ten k, you really go to a special place inside yourself. I think that's part of what I enjoyed. It's about drawing on that spiritual strength that you have, trying to build that essence that you have to enable you to be a good person. But also having that warrior spirit.
Deek stopped the nation
"And whether you're an elite athlete or just someone who's going out there to run your first marathon, there's something pretty special about the experience."
A year after his first major, de Castella returned to Fukuoka and won the race in a personal best time of 2:08:18, only five seconds slower than the world's best, recently set by American Alberto Salazar in New York.
The timing records of marathons are viewed differently to track events because of variable courses and weather conditions.
Many people considered de Castella's Fukuoka run better than Salazar's effort, even though it was slower. The argument was settled when the New York course was found to be 148m short, making the Australian the fastest marathon runner ever.
De Castella's reputation was enhanced with a gold medal at the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane; his duel with Tanzanians Juma Ikangaa and Gidamis Shahanga captivated the country and made him famous.
"I felt like Moses, I was running headlong into this crowd and they would just part," he later said.
In 1983, the press began talking up a rivalry between de Castella and Salazar, who both agreed to enter the same race in Rotterdam.
Marathons that once barely rated air time or column inches were now creating headlines, and de Castella had become a spokesman, if not a talisman, for the first global running boom.
"You've gotta keep as calm and as relaxed as you can," de Castella explained to ABC reporter Peter Wilkins a week before Rotterdam.
"And you can't afford to waste any nervous energy before you start the race. The whole idea of the marathon is to use the energy stores that you're carrying with you as efficiently as you can while you're actually running."
Pat Clohessy was more excited than ever by his charge's potential.
"It's quite ominous, his form in the world cross country, where he finished sixth, just behind Salazar, and won (another race) near Milan," he said.
De Castella's support team, including Clohessy, Australian Institute of Sport physiologist Dick Telford, and his pregnant wife Gayelene Clews, travelled widely throughout the United States and Europe in the build up to Rotterdam.
It all went to plan.
De Castella won the internationally televised race in 2:08:37, two seconds ahead of Portugal's Carlos Lopes.
Salazar came fifth.
Months later, de Castella won the first ever marathon World Championships in Helsinki (Lopes and Salazar ran in the 10,000m event).
On his triumphant return to Australia, he was awarded a Member of the British Empire medal.
Then Rob and Gayelene became parents to daughter Krista.
"The last 12 months are going to be hard to beat," de Castella told a reporter.
"Brisbane, Rotterdam, Helsinki, and the baby."
He decided not to run another marathon until the Olympics in Los Angeles.
Instead, he would race shorter events over 8km to 15km in Australia, Europe and the United States; he aimed to be faster, stronger, and more durable than ever.
Battling the LA course, the heat, and a deep international field
De Castella thrashed his body in the early part of 1984 to condition it for the demands of the Los Angeles Olympics.
Most marathons are staged in spring or autumn, but the Olympics are always held in summer; heat and pollution were on the runner's mind.
''I don't think any of us have ever run in the kind of pollution that exists in Los Angeles, where it just sits there," he said five months before the Games.
"The carbon monoxide will burn your eyes, your lungs — no one knows how any of us will respond to it. I mean, no top athlete has ever been tested by running on a treadmill and with an exhaust pipe in his mouth.
''But I can't worry about the pollution because I can't control it. All I can do is go there being as fit as I can.''
He increased his workload to make sure he was ready for anything.
"I did a trip overseas on the road in the early part of 84," he recalls.
"I was unrelenting in terms of my commitment to the training. Rather than racing hard and just absorbing and recovering, I'd have these hard races on the road circuit in the US and then still get out and run a 21-22km hard run the next day. I was really just driving myself and pretty obsessed by my commitment to the training load. I overdid it."
A week before the men's marathon, the first Olympic marathon for women was won by American Joan Benoit. Australian champion Lisa Martin (later Ondieki) finished an impressive seventh to launch her Hall of Fame career.
One of the most memorable images of the Games was Swiss runner Gabriela Andersen-Schiess staggering from heat exhaustion into the stadium in 37th place.
This drew even more attention to the men's race, the last event of the Games.
"The only medal that would've mattered would've been a gold medal," De Castella says.
"I never really got too carried away with silver and bronze. Without being pretentious or anything, it was gold, winning, or nothing. You either won or you didn't."
A strange moment of celebrity lingers in his memory of the race build up.
"I remember in the room before you head out to the start, other athletes coming over. I remember someone came over and wanted to get my autograph. This is one of the athletes I'm racing against," he says.
The race began at 5pm to protect runners from the hottest part of the day. There were 13 spray stations and eight medical stations set up around the course.
De Castella was smiling on the starting line.
The other contenders for the gold included Salazar, who was claiming he had been unwell when de Castella beat him in Rotterdam.
There was Japan's Toshihiko Seko, runner of the third fastest time in history (2:08:38) in the Tokyo Marathon.
There were two Japanese brothers, Takeshi and Shigeru Soh.
New Zealand's Rod Dixon, winner of the previous New York Marathon, was a shot.
The Tanzanian Ikangaa, runner-up to Seko in the most recent Fukuoka Marathon, was in the discussion, as was 37-year-old Carlos Lopes, who was considered an outside favourite.
The race starts at 30km: De Castella is "off the boil"
As de Castella reminds runners at the Gold Coast Marathon every year, the race begins at 30km.
In Los Angeles, he was among the leaders with 12km to go, appearing comfortable, albeit sweat soaked from the 35C heat on the Marina Freeway.
Australians watching from their homes relied on the broadcaster's special commentator, former Olympian Bill Rodgers, to give updates from his position in a moving vehicle.
"De Castella is forging the pace at this time," Rodgers said.
Salazar had been dropped by the front runners, so had Dixon.
Seko was still in with a chance, buoyed by thousands of fans waving Japanese flags.
Several kilometres along the road, there were eight runners together at the head of the field but they were no longer as tightly bunched.
"Everyone is showing the strain of the race," Rodgers said.
"The race is breaking up."
Although it was not visible to casual onlookers, De Castella was starting to struggle.
He was finally paying the price for training too hard — wanting the gold too badly.
"I'd run really well and dominated the event through '81, '82, '83, and probably went to grab that elusive gold medal, tried to step up my training a notch more than I probably should've," he explains.
"The danger of the Olympics is it's once every four years, it is like the Everest, it's the pinnacle everyone wants to achieve, and the danger is that you want to do more.
"It means more so you want to do more, rather than having that confidence to just keep on doing what you've always done, which had worked for me for years and I probably should've just had that discipline to ease back a little bit and stuck with the program that worked really well for the previous years, rather than feeling as though I had to do a little bit more.
"The hard thing is when you overtrain, you think that the answer is to train harder. That's fine because being a big fella, I handled it and I usually recovered really well.
"But once you come off the boil and you get run down and you get depleted, the body just doesn't recover and it doesn't absorb the training and you just get more and more run down. I put myself in a hole."
He had tapered off his training before the Olympics, but it came marginally too late.
At the 35km mark, de Castella was dropped by the other leading runners at a drink station.
He tried in vain to catch up.
"Just a change in pace and I wasn't on top of my form to be able to respond to the moves," he says.
"There's always movement and little bit of tactics around the drink stations, so you've gotta be able to respond and I was pretty empty by then and just trying to hang on."
Rodgers called the action with some astonishment: "Rob de Castella is falling off the pace. The pack really is splitting up once again. I think it's got to be the effect of the heat. I think it's dangerous for Rob de Castella to fall off this much, to be honest. I think Rob might be having a bad day."
The race, and the gold medal, was lost.
Portugal's Lopes surprised everyone by holding his best form all the way to the finish, winning gold in 2:09:21 ahead of two unheralded runners, Ireland's John Treacy and Great Britain's Charlie Spedding.
De Castella displayed enormous courage to make the top five. Seko fell back to 14th, Salazar 15th. A third of the field would fail to finish due to the harsh conditions.
"I think, finishing fifth, in hindsight, again rationalising it, was a pretty good performance," he says.
"I don't know if there's any photos of me around from the finish line but one of my eyes was all infected and puffed up. It was almost like I'd been punched by Mike Tyson, and I think that was also just the pollution that was in the air. It was a pretty tough race. It was pretty horrid."
How to handle a missed opportunity that only comes around every four years
The question remains — how does a world champion deal with not winning at the Olympics?
That was de Castella's best chance.
His disappointment stung, but not for too long.
"I came back here to Canberra and went up into the mountains with a mate," he recalls.
They went cross country skiing and camping on Mount Perisher.
"I remember sitting up in the mountains, feeling sorry for myself, looking around, thinking, shit, what am I on about? Here I am, I'm a blip in time. These mountains have been here forever and they're going to be here well and truly after I'm gone and I'm forgotten," he says.
"So, get over it and get on with your life and stop feeling sorry for yourself.
"I love the mountains, the high plains. When you're out there in the fresh air and there's not a soul around. It's pretty spiritual. And for me it was a realisation and coming to terms with stuff, putting it behind me and moving on."
De Castella draws a distinction between a bad day and failure.
"Los Angeles, I think it was a lost opportunity," he says.
"Lopes was incredible on the day and I may not have beaten him anyway. I wasn't in my best form, which is really disappointing because the only event you really want to be at your best in is the Olympics. But that's life.
"At the time (training) I believed I was doing what I needed to do. It wasn't like I was floating around and bludging, and I wasn't mucking around.
"I was just driven by my commitment and my drive, and just made a mistake.
"I obviously never wanted to fail, but I was more afraid of looking back and feeling as though I didn't do everything I could possibly do. That, to me, would be failure, regardless of whether I won or not.
"Failure is when you look back and you have regrets that you didn't try.
"So even with Los Angeles, I have regrets because I made mistakes but I don't have regrets that I didn't try. If anything, I tried too hard."
The past, future and present: De Castella's legacy is larger than his athletic career
De Castella competed in two more Olympic Games, finishing 8th in the heat and humidity of Seoul, 1988, and 26th in Barcelona, 1992, by which time he was director of the Australian Institute of Sport, working 60 hours a week.
"Under the circumstances I probably did reasonably well," he says.
He continued to run major marathons when they fitted into his busy schedule of other distance races.
After recovering from Los Angeles, he and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado; the Americans were rapt when he finally agreed to compete in the famous Boston Marathon in 1986.
"I plan to run forever,"' he told the press.
He dominated the event in a state of flow, and won in 2:07:51.
"I was in incredible shape," he recalls.
"I think that was close to the ultimate marathon for me. As a competitive athlete you're racing against everyone else who lines up, but to me you're racing against yourself and the event, the marathon and the course.
"And Boston is a spectacular course, this history of the Boston marathon is amazing, and it really provided a backdrop for me to do something that I was incredibly proud of. It was the ultimate expression of my marathon quest to run the perfect marathon."
A few months later, he won the Commonwealth Games gold medal in Edinburgh. Five years later, he celebrated his final marathon victory in Rotterdam.
In athletic retirement, de Castella has contributed to various community services.
In 2003, he was the public face of the Canberra bushfire tragedy, losing his home before assisting the Bushfire Recovery Taskforce.
"We had nothing, we lost everything," he later said.
"I had my wife and my children. Theresa (his second wife) and I had to be strong for the kids."
For the past 15 years, de Castella has been doing his most important work as creator and director of the Indigenous Marathon Project, training men and women to compete in the New York Marathon and promoting better health in remote communities.
Indigenous Marathon Project sheds light on health
The foundation now boasts 142 graduates.
"I feel the foundation will be my legacy," he says.
"I love the connection that I'm developing with those young, emerging leaders in Australia, the First Nations leaders that we're supporting to inspire and drive change and be these incredible champions.
"Obviously, we're a charity, health promotion, so it's not about running fast."
On the Gold Coast this year, 33 IMP runners competed in the distance events.
"To think in 2010, no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ran," he says.
"None had run a major international marathon. We've now got three who've run all the world's six majors.
"It is difficult.There are disappointments, injuries and setbacks, and you don't always achieve what you want to achieve, despite giving one hundred per cent. And you've got to deal with that, just like I had to deal with Los Angeles. And that helps you to build that resilience.
"You don't become resilient by having an easy life. You become resilient by bouncing back from tough things in your life and a lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have got incredibly challenging pasts and that has given them a strength and a resilience they can apply and harness to make a difference."
Originally published in ABCNews online 5th August 2024
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I thought "Rob de Castella" meant stealing someone's cigar. Or pandan cake...
If it were a Chinese wot won the marathon, all the energy and PED would, I'd imagine, be expended by all righteous Oz athletes and coaches, in calling the Chinese a cheat.
And there would be a spot of the sport of "Abo-bashing" on Oz's too many Chinese too!
I would have loved Oz fielded Penny Wong as a boxer. It would be fair competition her and that Algerian thing slugging it out.
Slugging as in boxing, and not as in applying Vaseline to wherever, of course.