Harold Nelson

Opening day of the 1950 British Empire Games, 5 February, the first track final, six miles, three men still in it at the bell, and the whole crowd on its feet, 40,000 packed all around the track, screaming for the Kiwi. Auckland’s Eden Park was sold out, the sun was shining, and the Opening Ceremony had treated them to a spectacle of marching and music more colourful than anything since the darkness of world war fell in 1939. And now Harold Nelson was leading along the final back straight, the last of twenty-four laps. A resolute Scot, Andrew Forbes, stayed stubbornly near enough to be a danger. Nelson didn’t falter. Short, light-stepping, and light-haired, twenty-six years old, tactically alert, in all black with an outsize silver fern on his chest, Nelson could almost have been Jack Lovelock come back home, alive.

Round the last bend and turning into the straight was like entering a tunnel of fervent patriotic sound, and Nelson responded. He won 30:29.6 to 30:31.9, with a second New Zealander, Noel Taylor, adding to the crowd’s ecstasy by almost catching Forbes for the silver medal, given the same time. The track was grass, remember. The race had been enthrallingly tactical. Sometimes Nelson led, sometimes he followed. At one point early on, three New Zealanders were leading (there were four in the field), but in the fifth mile, Forbes and two Australians, John Davey and Alan Merrett, seemed to be getting away. But Nelson was watchful and ready, and closed the gap. He had been New Zealand junior mile champion and was confident of his finish.

Nelson aged 50 was at Queen Elizabeth II Park in Christchurch in January 1974 to see Richard Tayler emulate that legendary first-day victory in the longest track race. But even Tayler’s win was not as charged with national significance as Nelson’s. It was only five years after the war, and New Zealand sport had been struggling through a phase as dreary as the post-war economy. The team at the 1948 Olympics in London got nowhere near a medal in any sport, suffering a litany of first-round eliminations and dnf’s, including one of each for Harold Nelson. Near-certain medal hope Doug Harris was carried off on a stretcher. In rugby, 1949 is on record as “the blackest year in All Black history,” with a 4 – 0 series wipe-off by the Springboks in South Africa. The 1949 cricket tour of England had done better, but a series of four tests all ending with no result was hardly uplifting. And to end a dispiriting year, on 28 December 1949, the nation’s greatest sports hero Dr Jack Lovelock stumbled accidentally off a New York subway platform and died under a train, age 39.

So the first major Games festival ever mounted in New Zealand was needed. When the first gold medal, soon after the Opening Ceremony, was won so skillfully and uncompromisingly by a New Zealander, it was national rapture.

Harold Nelson is specially pleasing as a legend of New Zealand athletics, because he did so much more for the sport than win one gold medal on the right day. He was team captain and flag-bearer at the London Olympics and Auckland Empire Games, he served as Secretary, Treasurer, and (twice) President of the New Zealand Athletic Coaches Association, and he became Director of Coaching for Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, and the Solomon Islands. His decades of devoted coaching and officiating are remembered so gratefully by the athletics community in Nelson that he has become wholly their own. He is celebrated at the annual Harold Nelson Classic track meeting, Harold Nelson Way takes you to the Saxton Field arena, and when he was the first inductee into the Nelson Legends of Sport Gallery in 2006, he received a standing ovation that recalled the crowd’s response in 1950. Since he was born in Dunedin, and did all his running for Otago and Dunedin’s Civil Service Harriers, that acclaim indicates the value of his contributions after he moved to Nelson in 1951.

William Harold Nelson was born 26 April 1923, and attended Otago Boys’ High School, Otago University, and Dunedin Teachers’ College. He was contemporary as a post-war student with Arch Jelley, who has his own Legends profile. The two, and Arch’s brother Stan, were in the Otago team that won the New Zealand Cross-Country teams title in 1946, with Harold taking the individual championship.

Before that, taking inspiration from a film of Lovelock’s triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Nelson became a miler, and won the 1941 national junior (under-19) mile championship, in a junior record 4:30.0. Then he was called up for war service in the RNZ Air Force. He won services track events but was also seriously injured in an aircraft accident, and invalided home, where he underwent an operation that saved his running.

Resuming his education and his running at Otago University, he won the national cross-country in 1946, the national mile in 1947 (4:20.8), the three miles in 1947 (14:31.4) and 1948 (14:32.8), and the six miles in 1948 (29:54.4), all representing Otago, all on the less than impeccable grass tracks that were standard then in New Zealand. Nelson’s first race on a cinder track was at Wembley for the Olympics, but his failures there (dnf 10,000m, sixth and dnq in his 5000m heat) were more probably due to the month-long sea voyage and what was called “a stomach problem.” It is emerging that Nelson subscribed at that time to the widely accepted belief that distance runners should ingest no fluid on the day of the race. We know now it was folly, but Britain’s world-record breaking marathoner Jim Peters was another who followed it religiously, with disastrous effects at Helsinki and Vancouver in 1952 and 1954.

That primitive belief (water equals weakness) nearly cost Nelson his spot at the 1950 Empire Games, as he ran badly for second place at the national six miles, and he made the team (he was told later) only on a majority vote of the selectors. By the time of the Games, he had changed his views on liquids, happily, as the day was warm and he had to march around with the flag as well as win the six miles.

In the three miles, only two days later (7 Feb, not the three or four days recovery stated in every previous account), the crowds urged him to repeat, and he went close, making a good race of it, but England’s Len Eyre was also a miler, and sprinted away on the last lap. Nelson on tired legs was second in 14:27.8. His six miles rival Forbes struggled wearily round the three miles as last finisher. Nelson’s gold and silver medals put him equal with Yvette Williams (first long jump, second javelin) as the home team’s most successful performers in athletics.   

Nelson’s sixth and last national senior title was winning the cross-country in 1951. He also won another team gold medal that day, still with Otago. No road championships were available in that era. Married in 1948, he moved to a teaching post in Nelson in 1951, and became a successful coach, preferring to concentrate on sprints. “I would have loved to make coaching my career,” he told New Zealand Runner in June 1978, but professional coaching did not yet exist. That interview also revealed that Nelson the sprint coach placed emphasis on hill-work, and on running style. And, for all runners, he advised plenty of liquids.

As well as his local coaching, he organised the athletics at the 1983 South Pacific Games in Samoa, was a track official at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, and remembered his origins by organising the seventy-fifth jubilee celebrations of the once famed Civil Service Harrier Club in Dunedin. He also kept running, on the trails and beaches he loved, until well into his sixties. Nelson was awarded the MBE in 1986. He died on 1 July 2011, age 88, having spent two years as New Zealand’s oldest living Olympian.  

Written by Roger Robinson