Arch Jelley

In terms of longevity and consistent success few New Zealand running coaches hold quite the same standing as the ageless Arch Jelley.

Sharp of mind and strong in body, the 97-year-old in his quiet, understated way has developed dozens of New Zealand’s leading athletes during a coaching career that spanned more than five-and-a-half decades.

Born the second eldest of five children in Dunedin, he grew up in a fanatical cricket household and his father, Albie Jelley, featured as a first-class cricket umpire.

Arch dabbled in gymnastics and boxing in his youth but found his short and light frame best suited to running and he joined the Mornington Harrier Club at the age of 18.

He went on to enjoy “some success” on the track before his athletics ambitions were put on hold because of the Second World War.

Serving in New Zealand for the Scottish Regiment he was later posted in England for Navy training. On board the HMS Bermuda on Russian Convoy duty he was later commissioned as a Sub Lieutenant RNZNVR and posted as a Gunnery Officer on coastal submarines.

Following the conclusion of the Second World War he returned to New Zealand to begin studies at Dunedin Teachers’ College and at the University of Otago and re-engaged with running.

In 1946 he was selected on the six-man Otago team alongside Harold Nelson – who went on to win the 1950 British and Empire Commonwealth Games six-mile title in Auckland – to compete at the New Zealand Cross Country Championships in Wellington.

In one of Arch’s finest competitive displays, he finished fourth as the Otago team clinched five of the first six places.

An “okay” but not great runner his approach to training was fairly unsophisticated.

“I had a coach who concentrated on interval training,” he admits. “Twice a week we would meet at the Caledonian Ground to run 400m reps as fast as we could. We had no aerobic base whatsoever, it was completely the wrong training.”

His teaching career was then to take him to rural Whanganui – where he competed for the West Coast North Island – and to Wellington, where he represented the Olympic Club. It was during his time in the capital city where he met his first wife, Rachel. The pair married in 1953 until her death in 2000 and he fully acknowledges the huge influence she played on his life.

“Rachel was always very pragmatic and nothing fazed her,” he explains. “If an incident happened she always took it in her stride and decided best on how to solve the situation – and I think that rubbed off on me. It gave me the confidence, that if you have a problem, work out a way to solve it.”

An Otago, West Coast North Island and Wellington representative and a former West Coast North Island three-mile and Wellington six-mile champion, Arch was also an active organiser at the various clubs he has represented. While not yet a formal coach he regular organised training groups and was a natural leader.

In January 1957 he moved north to Auckland to continue his teaching career. He later took up a position as Principal at Sunnybrae Normal School on the North Shore, where he served as principal for more than 20 years. During his time there he coached numerous sports including co-coaching of the swim squad – two members of which later represented New Zealand at the Olympic Games.

He continued running in Auckland but it was after moving to Owairaka Harriers – the home club of coaching legend Arthur Lydiard – which kick-started his athletics coaching career.

“Down south in the late-1940s we first heard about this crazy guy called Arthur Lydiard, who was asking his track runners to run 100 miles a week,” he recalls.

“When I first arrived at Owairaka, I was amazed how many good runners there were – people like Snell and Halberg, Julian and Puckett. That’s when I first saw just how phenomenally good Arthur’s ideas were.”

Reading more about Lydiard’s methods, Arch also discovered more about the coaching principles of other such as Arthur Newton (an English-born long-distance runner) and Emil Zatopek (the four-time Olympic distance-running champion from Czechoslovakia) and in 1960 he took the plunge into coaching for the first time.

“I’d always been interested in helping other runners become better but after my experience at Owairaka I thought, if Arthur can do this then I’m pretty sure I can too,” he comments.

Initially taking on a large group of club runners from both the Owairaka Club and beyond – like Arthur he used to take his athletes around the gruelling 22-mile Waiatarua loop every weekend.

In 1962 Arch started coaching his first high profile athlete, the talented Neville Scott – a 1500m finalist at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games three mile bronze medallist.

Neville battled alcoholism throughout his career and his occasionally erratic approach to training could frustrate but under Arch’s patient guidance he re-emerged into world-class.

“He was a great runner and in Manurewa for a 5000m race (against Sir Murray Halberg who was attempting the world record) it was Neville, who for some reason had decided to run barefoot, who ran away from Halberg,” explains Arch of the race in 1963. “He had a big lead going into the final lap but the soles of his feet were badly damaged and he was forced to slow down and Halberg won. If he had worn spikes that day he would have beaten Halberg.”

Unfortunately, a hip injury sustained in a heavy fall badly compromised Scott’s chances at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and running in intense pain he finished last in his heat of the 5000m.

“He was a great runner but you had to be careful because if you asked him to run ten reps for a session he would do 20,” explains Arch.

Another of Arch’s early success stories was guiding Ian Studd to a bronze medal in the mile at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston

Despite being more of a 5000m/three-mile specialist, Ian claimed an unexpected podium place in Jamaica – a performance which delighted his coach.

“I was so thrilled he won a bronze because nobody thought he had a hope,” he explains.

Success with Neville and Ian had raised his profile within the New Zealand athletics coaching community, but it was to be his long-standing relationship with Sir John Walker which was to define his coaching career.

John first approached Arch to coach him after finishing second at a cross country race at Auckland’s Hobsonville Point. Barely training at the time, Arch gave him a training programme and on the back of this just six weeks later he avenged that defeat to land the Auckland U20 Cross Country title.

For a time the pair drifted apart but after John finished last in the senior men’s 800m final at the 1971 New Zealand Track & Field Championships he once again asked Arch if he would coach him.

Arch agreed, although his star quality was not initially obvious.

“I thought he was okay, but I didn’t think he was going to be a world beater,” adds Arch.

That all changed on New Year’s Day in 1972 in Tauranga when he caused a sensation to defeat Dick Quax, New Zealand’s foremost endurance runner at that time.

John had not planned to run that day but was persuaded to take on Quax, and running in borrowed spikes, singlet and shorts he claimed a surprise victory in a personal best time of 1:51.

“I wasn’t there but I was pretty impressed,” explains Arch. “On the back of this, I wrote to selectors to say we have this big, fast, strong guy with a good temperament, who one day can become one of our very best runners and possibly erase the name of Peter Snell from the record books.”  

Later in 1972 he won the New Zealand 800m title but narrowly missed out on a place at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Adopting a Lydiard high-mileage model to John’s training – which included regular sessions on the gruelling Waiatarua Loop – he continued to improve and in 1974 was all set to fire at the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.

An impressive 600m time trial close to the Games convinced Arch that John was in great shape – a sentiment backed up after he set a personal best of 1:44.92 to win an 800m bronze medal – a mark which still sits second on the all-time New Zealand lists for the distance behind Sir Peter Snell.

John then set out for the 1500m – in a race which is commonly regarded as the greatest ever over the metric mile.

In a phenomenal demonstration of courageous front running, Fibert Bayi of Tanzania set a new world record with John winning silver in 3:32.52 – at the time the second fastest time in history

“I was a wee bit disappointed John had got beaten, but on the other hand it was a great race,” explains Arch. “I’m not typically a ra-ra boy but, apparently, I looked at my watch, stood up from seat and shouted excitedly, ‘it’s a world record’!”

The following year, Arch helped guide John to a quite brilliant world mile record of 3:49.4 in Gothenburg – to become the first man in history to run a sub-3:50 mile.

With typical modesty, Arch downplays the significance of having tweaked John’s training to re-introduce greater mileage to offset the high level of speedwork he had carried out throughout the summer in the weeks leading into Gothenburg.

He recalls, however, the moment of joy he felt on hearing news of the record. “Somebody rang me on the morning of the race (evening in Europe) on my birthday (August 13). Not a bad birthday present.”

In 1976 John continued to clock up the great performances by obliterating the world 2000m record in Oslo leading into the Montreal Olympics.

Going into the Games as pre-event favourite, the pair managed to navigate a route through the high-level of expectation and Arch even had a chuckle at John’s comments after receiving a media grilling following his elimination from the 800m heats.

“I was actually quite pleased John had been knocked out of the 800m heats (because it gave him extra time to prepare for the 1500m),” he said. “The press were on to John but he said (of his premature 800m elimination), ‘I’m disappointed tonight not because I was knocked out of the 800m, but because my coach beat me at snooker for the first time’!”

Pinpointing John’s “very good race temperament” as one of his strengths he ran the final to perfection to strike gold by 0.10 from Ivo Van Damme although Arch – ever the perfectionist – was not elated John opted to fling his arms to the air in triumph a metre or so before the finish line.

Injuries curtailed the second half of John’s career as Arch was forced to limit his high-mileage work and focus more on speedwork. Despite this John went on to better his New Zealand mile record with a 3:49.08 display in 1982 and at their home track at Mt Smart Stadium in 1985 he became the first man in history to run 100 sub-four-minute miles.

Arch coached John right through to his retirement in 1992, so what was the secret to their success?

“We weren’t similar types, John is an extrovert, and I’m the opposite but we both trusted each other implicitly,” he says. “John was very good at coming to training and doing what I wanted and I think in all the time I knew him he was only late for training twice.”

Arch may be best associated with his long and successful time with Sir John but he coached dozens of other leading athletes during his career including 1988 Seoul Olympic 3000m runner Chrissie Pfitzinger, two-time Olympic distance runner Robbie Johnston, 1987 World Championship marathoner Hazel Stewart, 1990 Commonwealth 10,000m bronze medallist Barbara Moore, 1978 Commonwealth Games middle-distance representatives Dennis Norris and Alison Wright and former US mile record-holder Steve Scott, whom he guided to fifth at the 1988 Olympic 1500m final.

In 2000 following the death of his first wife he retired from athletics coaching only to return five years later after receiving a call from the mum of Kiwi middle-distance runner Hamish Carson asking for Arch to coach him. Arch agreed and at the age of 93 he successfully guided the five-time national 1500m champion to the 2016 Rio Olympics.

He has also served in a multitude of administration and management roles within the sport. He coached the New Zealand team at the 1976 and 1984 Olympics and was manager on the New Zealand team at the inaugural World Championships in 1983. He has also served as a New Zealand selector for 15 years as the New Zealand National Event coach for Middle and Long distance and is a former President and Ombudsman for Athletics NZ.

He was awarded an OBE for services to sport to 1981 and along with Arthur Lydiard was one of four coaches inducted into the NZ Athletics Coaches Hall of Fame. In 1987 he was awarded an International Amateur Athletic Federation Diploma.

Adopting a simple but effective approach to coaching he believes he learned many of the principles from his time in education.

“I applied the same philosophy to coaching as I did teaching,” he explains. “I was always a great believer in making things interesting, not too serious and being positive. I would never criticise an athlete for a bad race, if it is anyone’s fault it is the coach’s.”

Throughout his career he based his training principles on that of Arthur Lydiard but he was never a total Lydiard acolyte.

“Arthur’s principles are tremendous but on the other hand you can’t turn every athlete into a 100-mile a week trainer,” he says. “There are different ways of achieving aerobic fitness and in New Zealand we tend to think Arthur’s way is the only way. But other countries have accepted his ways and developed other methods. One good example is Frank Horwill (the late British coach) whose ideas are phenomenally good. Connect Arthur’s ideas with Frank’s and you get some great results.”

In 2002 he married his second wife, Jean, who was his bridge partner and someone he had known for a decade. Jean’s ex-husband, David, and Arch’s wife, Rachel, died within months of each other.

Today the pair live happily in a retirement village in the West Auckland suburb of Green Bay. Arch and Jean still teaches bridge weekly at the Mt Albert Bridge Club and he believes he is doubly blessed to have had two capable wives who have put up with his obsessions and steered him in the right direction. Together they have eight children, 16 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Written by Steve Landells