Peter Snell

• Born: December 17, 1938
• Birthplace: Opunake, New Zealand
• Died: December 12, 2019
• Place of death: Dallas, Texas

Sport: Track and field (middle-distance runs)

Early Life

Peter George Snell was born on December 17, 1938, in Opunake, a small coastal town in southwestern New Zealand. His father was an engineer. In 1947, his family moved to Te Aroha, New Zealand, where he attended elementary school. Even as a boy, he was extremely active. He consumed such great quantities of honey to maintain his energy that his mother bought 60 pounds at a time to keep him supplied. When he was in secondary school, he often played tennis all morning, played cricket all afternoon, and then ran on the track in the evening.

The Road to Excellence

Although he set school records in the mile and the half-mile at Mount Albert Grammar School, his secondary school, Snell did not specialize in running. He also competed successfully in other sports, such as tennis, cricket, golf, rugby, and hockey. Tennis was originally his best sport. While at Mount Albert, he reached the national quarterfinals in that sport before he was eliminated.

Despite his unwillingness to concentrate solely on middle-distance running, Snell’s times steadily improved while he was at Mount Albert. In his senior year, he won the half-mile run at the Auckland Inter-Secondary Schools Athletic Championship in 1 minute 59.6 seconds. When he left school, he was initially undecided about whether to continue in tennis or in track, but eventually decided to be a runner. Each weekend, after his job as a construction surveyor ended, he traveled to Pukekohe to help his parents build a new home for themselves. This trip became an important part of his training. He rode a bus for the first twenty miles of each trip, then ran the final ten miles.

This long-distance training helped Snell to develop the endurance base that contributed to his success in racing. Near the end of 1957, he made a substantial improvement in his best half-mile time, lowering it to 1 minute 54.1 seconds. This attracted the attention of New Zealand’s most famous track coach, Arthur Lydiard, and he became Snell’s coach. Lydiard required even middle-distance runners to do marathon training, including a weekly 22-mile run over a hilly course. Although Snell suffered such pain that he broke into tears the first time he ran the course, he persevered and soon began to benefit from it.

The Emerging Champion

In 1959, Snell emerged as the New Zealand national champion at both the half-mile and the mile and set a New Zealand record for the 800-meter run. Just as he was making steady improvement in his performances, he broke a bone in his leg. He was unable to train for two months, and when he returned to competition, he lost several races in relatively poor times.

From March 1960 until the Olympic Games in August of that year, Snell did not run in any races. Instead, he concentrated on building himself up by hard training, often running one hundred miles per week. The Olympic 800-meter competition required athletes to run three heats and a final in four days, giving an advantage to the runners who had endurance as well as speed.

Snell was virtually an unknown at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games and was not expected to have a chance against the favorites in the 800-meter race. At 5 feet 10 inches and weighing 171 pounds, Snell was much heavier than most middle-distance runners, with a muscular build better suited for a sprinter than a distance runner. He ran a shrewd race, however, placing himself just behind the leader until they were only twenty-five yards from the finish line. Then he sprinted ahead, barely finishing first in the Olympic-record time of 1 minute 46.3 seconds.

Continuing the Story

In 1962, Snell began to concentrate on the mile run. He was so successful that he was ranked the world’s best in the mile in 1962, 1963, and 1964. He peaked in January 1964, when he set a world record for the event in 3 minutes 54.1 seconds. In the following months, he also established world records at the mile, half-mile, 800-meter, and indoor-1,000-meter distances.

In 1963, however, Snell did not train consistently, and some thought he was finished as a runner. He proved them wrong at the 1964 Olympic Games. Prior to the Games, Snell ran one hundred miles a week for ten weeks. That gave him the endurance necessary to run the six races required for him to compete in the finals of both the 800 and the 1,500 meters. Despite having to run three 800-meter races in three consecutive days, he won the 800-meter final easily in an Olympic record time of 1 minute 45.1 seconds.

Snell was concerned about the 1,500-meter run because the final was to be his sixth race in eight days and he feared his legs would be tired. He therefore concentrated on winning the race rather than running the fastest possible time. He held back until the last 200 meters of the race, then unleashed a powerful sprint, finishing in 3 minutes 38.1 seconds, ten yards ahead of the second-place runner.

Although he was worn out and suffering from minor injuries, after the Olympics, Snell embarked on a worldwide series of races. He won frequently; however, he found he had to strain to defeat runners he could normally beat easily. When he began to lose races and run disappointing times despite all-out efforts, he accepted that he was no longer in condition to compete and retired from racing in 1965.

In addition to serving in a promotional role for Rothmans International in the years following his departure from competitive running, he turned to academia. After earning a bachelor's degree in human performance at the University of California, Davis, as well as a PhD in exercise physiology from Washington State University, he spent time as a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He then began a teaching tenure at Texas Southwestern in the Department of Internal Medicine before going on to also head the university's Human Performance Center. In 2017, eight years after he was knighted, he took part as a competitor in the table tennis category in New Zealand's World Masters Games. After battling against problems with his heart for some time, Snell died at his home in Dallas, Texas, on December 12, 2019, at the age of eighty.

Summary

Peter Snell’s heavy, muscular build placed him at a disadvantage when competing with lighter runners. However, no one could exceed Snell’s fierce determination to succeed, which made him the world’s outstanding middle-distance runner in the early 1960s.

Bibliography

Beck, Kevin. Run Strong. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 2005.

Corrigan, Robert J. Tracking Heroes: Thirteen Track and Field Champions. Nashville, Tenn.: Winston-Derek, 1990.

Goldstein, Richard. "Peter Snell, Record-Breaking Runner in the 1960s, Dies at 80." The New York Times, 17 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/sports/olympics/peter-snell-dead.html. Accessed 6 July 2020.

Snell, Peter, and Garth Gilmour. Use It or Lose It: Be Fit, Live Well. Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin Group, 2006.