On August 1st, 1932 Bob Tisdall, the centenary of whose birth occurred this year, thrilled the Irish nation by winning the gold medal in the 400-metres hurdles at the Los Angeles Olympics.
No sooner had he won than he turned to assist the Irish hammer-thrower Dr Pat O'Callaghan, who had been prevented by the spikes on his shoes from achieving his best distance. Tisdall got to work to file them down and O'Callaghan, the defending champion, won the event with his last throw, making it the greatest day Ireland has ever known at the Olympic Games.
Robert Morton Newburgh Tisdall, to give him his full name, was born on May 16th, 1907 in Ceylon, where his Irish father was a tea planter. Young Bob was sent to Ireland when he was five and was brought up by his maternal Morton relatives in Nenagh, Co Tipperary until his parents' return.
In 1921, as a result of an incident in which a policeman was foully killed outside their house, the family were ordered by the local IRA to depart the country. Although they were able to return in 1924, Tisdall recalled in an unpublished memoir of his life that "what happened to us in Ireland did leave an invisible wound upon my love for that country".
By now he was at school at Shrewsbury. His athletic ability got him into Caius College Cambridge, which numbered among its recent graduates the 1924 Olympic sprint champion Harold Abrahams, hero of the film Chariots of Fire. Tisdall swept all before him in university athletics. At the intervarsity games in 1931, he made history by winning the 120m hurdles, the long jump, the shot putt and the quarter-mile. Some Cambridge friends persuaded him to try for the Olympic Games in 1932.
Despite his early disenchantment with Ireland, he offered his services to General Eoin O'Duffy, President of the Irish Olympic Council. The event Tisdall chose, the 400m hurdles, was one that he had run only once previously. He was called to trials at Croke Park and achieved the qualifying time at his second attempt.
The 10-day journey to Los Angeles for the Olympics was so exhausting that he had to rest in bed for four days to restore his weight. Having qualified for the finals he suffered an attack of the jitters while he waited in the tunnel for the race, but was sportingly calmed down by Lord Burghley, the defending champion. Tisdall led all the way to win comfortably in a world record time of 51.7 seconds. But because he knocked the last hurdle, he was, under the prevailing rule, denied the record.
He and O'Callaghan received heroes' welcomes in Ireland. Crowds lined the streets and President de Valera gave a State dinner in their honour. "It filled me," he wrote years later, "with a love of Ireland and its people which I still feel."
At a lunch given in the Guinness brewery in Dublin he was offered £1,000 if he would allow the company to use his statement after the Olympics that he had done it on Guinness. But he was unwilling to sacrifice his amateur status by doing so.
He did voluntary work, setting up a youth movement with General O'Duffy - it was later transformed into the Blueshirts. He was asked to stand for Tipperary in the forthcoming general election which, having regard to what had happened in 1921, he confessed to finding "heart-warming and truly Irish". But, unable to find any suitable employment, this great sporting hero left Ireland empty-handed apart from a gift of £200 he received from O'Duffy. He did not return for 20 years.
Back in England, he wrote a charming book entitled The Young Athlete, which contains advice for athletes, personal memories and some good photographs. It is dedicated to Lord Burghley, for whose assistance at the Olympics he was eternally grateful.
At the end of 1933 Tisdall emigrated to South Africa, where he worked as a sports master before setting up a gymnasium in Johannesburg. He helped to raise a regiment of the South African Irish in the second World War and was part of the force that chased the Italians out of Ethiopia.
After the war he worked in Rhodesia and Kenya before settling on a coffee farm in Tanzania. He became a friend of President Julius Nyerere and promoted sport in his spare time. The East Africa Olympic Committee sent him as its representative to the Rome Olympics of 1960.
In the mid-1960s he returned to live in Bantry near his Murphy grandmother's family home and grew mushrooms. But he found the cold and damp intolerable and, after a few years, he emigrated with his second wife and three children to farm in Queensland, Australia.
He was an honoured guest at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. Pat O'Callaghan was there as well. Thames Television made a wonderful hour-long film, One Golden Hour, of these two very different Irishmen recalling their great day in 1932. It deserves to be shown again.
Tisdall retained his charm and handsome appearance into advanced old age. He kept himself fit, playing tennis, golfing and swimming. In 2000, aged 93, he jogged carrying the Olympic torch through Nambour in Queensland on its way to the Sydney Olympics.
He was feted on his occasional return visits to his beloved Lough Derg - all the more so as Ronnie Delany's victory in Melbourne was the only gold medal in a track event won by Ireland since 1932. In 2002, two years before Tisdall's death, a statue of him racing over hurdles was erected in front of the courthouse in Nenagh in the presence of several of his children and of Ronnie Delany. Tisdall spoke live on video from Australia afterwards.
He died on July 28th, 2004. His life recalls a vanished age of the Corinthian ideal when sport, even at the highest level, was still sport and was its own reward.