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Cramming in the records Twenty years ago this month, Steve Cram ran his third world record in 19 days. PAUL HALFORD asked him to relive that historic summer
Yet for many Cram will be best remembered for a feat which is unlikely to be repeated for generations by another Briton. Within just 19 days – between July 16 and August 4 – he set three world records. He set a 1500m record in Nice, a mile record in Oslo and a 2000m record in Budapest. Ironically, the staging of the World Championships, initially every four years but now every other, helps to ensure that Cram’s feat in 1985 is extremely unlikely to be duplicated. In those days, the top athletes had a year without a major championship in which to focus instead on the grand prix circuit and chasing world records. You would think that Cram would believe that the sport suffers from the “Worlds” being staged bi-annually. “I used to think that,” he told Athletics Weekly earlier this summer. “What I think now is that the sport needs shop windows and championships like that are the best shop windows.
Full story in issue 59-32, 10th August 2005.
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WHEN
Steve Cram commentates today for the BBC on the final of the World
Championships 1500m, it will bring back special memories. For in the
same stadium in 1983, the north-easterner won the metric mile in
these championships to become, after Daley Thompson, Britain’s
second world champion.
