http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/more-sports/former-champion-sprinter-mike-agostini-has-died-at-the-age-of-81/news-story/929d54f89ee4d34b8401483974a37e7cFormer champion sprinter Mike Agostini has died at the age of 81
MICHAEL George “Mike” Agostini celebrated his 19th birthday in January 1954 by thrashing the Olympic sprint champion on an indoor track over 100 yards — smashing a 30-year-old world record running in jogging shoes.
The teenager from Trinidad was celebrated as The World’s Fastest Human in some American sports magazines, but his status would be challenged by Queenslander Hector Hogan who two months later equalled the world record outdoors for 100 yards and also 100 metres in separate races on the same day on grass at Sydney Sports Ground.
It would be the first time Agostini’s thoughts turned to Australia but far from the last as the excitement built toward the Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, Canada in July of 1954 and the showdown to determine The World’s Fastest Man.
Looking back on his first world record race, Agostini recalled: “The world indoor record had stood for 30 years at 9.8 sec and I ran 9.6. We ran on (wooden) boards at the 175th Street Armory in Washington DC, no spikes, flat shoes, but it was a pretty good field including Lindy Remigino the reigning Olympic 100 metres champion and Art Bragg the reigning American 100 yards champion. That was my second race in the US. I had just gone to study at Villanova university.
“A few months later in March ’54 Hec Hogan emerged. He was known. Hogan won the Australian nationals in 1952. He was promising but he wasn’t known on the world circuit yet until he ran 9.3 sec to equal the world 100y record in one race and then on the same day he ran 10.2 for the 100m but that world record couldn’t be officially recognised because it was set in a handicap race.”
At that stage the men’s 100y showdown was being billed as the most significant and exciting event of any sport at the upcoming Empire and Commonwealth Games but the middle distance runners conspired to usurp that status.
So on August 7, 1954 during the Vancouver Games, millions tuned in on radio as the only two sub-4min milers in history raced in the Miracle Mile while the clash of the world record holders for the indoor and outdoor 100 yards to some degree lost its premier status.
The 100m world record would stand at 10.2 shared by nine men — including Jesse Owens — until 1956 when it was lowered to 10.1 yet as far back as 1953 Agostini had run 9.9 sec in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
“The officials came running down waving handkerchiefs and when I asked what’s that about they said, ‘man, we ain’t got no wind gauge and the time you run isn’t going to be believed. Little unknown boy from Trinidad,” Agostini recalled in an interview in 2014.
“So the time was not submitted as a world record but I never worried about it because I was and still am optimistic. If I wasn’t turning 80 and didn’t have arthritis and all that, I still think I could go out and break the world record. That’s what sprinters have to be like: you’re scared in the background but on the other hand you’re optimistic and arrogant almost.”
One of Agostini’s mentors was Mal Whitfield, the US Olympic 800m champion in 1948 and 1952, who influenced Mike in his approach to the showdown with Hogan in Vancouver.
Whitfield told Mike: “Man you get out there and just tell ‘em what you gonna do. And if you don’t do it you gonna make a fool of yourself and you don’t wanna make a fool of yourself.”
Agostini recalled: “So I got to Vancouver and the media met me and said ‘what have you come here to do?’ I said I’ve come for the gold medal. And they said ‘but what about Hogan?’ I just replied: Who the heck is Hogan?”
And Hec took the bait. The following day there was an interview with Hogan who said “that’s the tonic I need, Agostini carrying on like that. I’ll whip the pants off him.”
“So I kept this going the whole way through on what I’d been taught by Whitfield and also Andy Stanfield who was the Olympic 200 champion. I didn’t even speak to Hec until we got to the final and then I gave him a big smile, stuck out a hand and said ‘no hard feelings Hec, let the best man win.’ And he just went to water. He finished third. That’s part of the game.”
To some extent it seemed Agostini’s drive to be the best, the need to be known, followed him out of the shadows of those Vancouver Games when even proving himself to be the world’s best must not have seemed good enough.
Mike Agostini has died at the age of 81.
In their 14 sprint encounters Hogan beat Agostini only once but his timing was auspicious. He won the 100m bronze medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, bumping Agostini back to sixth place.
“Look God bless him. Four years later on the day of the Olympic final in Rome we got the message that Hec had died of leukaemia. All I could say is God bless you man, you deserved that Olympic medal which is still the only Olympic men’s 100m medal won by an Australian.”
Agostini’s fourth and sixth places in the Melbourne Olympics were impressive when you consider he had travelled for seven days from the Caribbean arriving just a week before the Games, while other teams have been training in Australia for a month.
Agostini lingered in Australia after the Melbourne Olympics and returned to compete again in 1957 and in 1959 he returned and stayed, as he said just weeks ago: “Because I finally found where I was supposed to be — in the best country into the world.”
And now Mike Agostini too has run his race. He has died in Sydney, on May 12, 2016, aged 81, of pancreatic cancer with his family by his hospital bed.
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