Good Sports
IN 1949, David Johnson was the world’s fastest schoolboy athlete.
Running in the NSW All Schools Athletic Championships at the Sydney Cricket Ground that year, the 17-year-old Wollongong High student clocked 9.7 seconds in the open 100 yards final.
This broke the previous mark and according to available records at the time, it was the quickest time for that distance ever recorded by a schoolboy.
The next day, the Sunday Sun ran a story stating that he was the world’s fastest schoolboy and PIX magazine ran a similar story a few days later.
The 9.7 seconds was just one-tenth of a second outside the 1949 Australian senior record, which was held jointly by John Treloar, Jim Carlton and Brian Dunn.
Three months later, in January 1950, David was named in the Australian team for the Empire Games, as the Commonwealth Games were called in those days, in Auckland. At 18 years two months, David was the team’s youngest member.
He came home with a gold medal from the 4 x 110 yards relay and silver in the 220 yards.
The relay team – Treloar, Bill de Gruchy, Alastair Gordon and David – ran a time of 42.2 seconds to take the gold from England, 0.3 of a second behind.
In the 220 yards, Treloar won in 21.5 seconds with David 0.3 seconds behind him.
Nerves got the better of him in the 100 yards. Running in the first heat of the first event of the Games on a hot, sunny day in front of more than 50,000 people, he finished fourth in his heat.
Before he could go to New Zealand, David had to raise £100 as his contribution to the cost of being on the team. The basic wage back then was about £8 a week.
The Mercury newspaper at Wollongong, plus the city’s lord mayor, came to the party in raising this money and David was very grateful for this help.
Each team member was given a uniform for marching in the opening and closing ceremonies. This comprised a white Bonds singlet with a map of Australia on the front, a panama hat and white cotton shorts with green and gold stripes down each side.
David’s mother made his tracksuit for him. In the sprint events, which were run on grass, David ran in shoes with 11⁄4-inch spikes.
Less than two weeks after returning from Auckland, he won the NSW junior 100 yards title in the outstanding time of 9.6 seconds. This equalled the Australian junior record and the NSW senior record.
David also won the NSW junior 220 yards title that day and flashed home in the 4 x 110 yards relay to give his club, the Botany Harriers, the NSW title.
Born in Marrickville in 1931, David attended Canterbury Boys High before moving to Wollongong with his family and starting at Wollongong High in 1946.
As well as dominating NSW schoolboy sprinting, he was a good rugby league player.
After passing his Leaving Certificate in 1949, he began work in 1950 as a trainee with a large Sydney engineering company.
With a new job and great success in his running, things were rosy for the 18-year-old athlete and he began dreaming about the 1952 Games. But about three months later tragedy struck when he was diagnosed with polio.
His mother nursed him at their home and he couldn’t work for four months. He did return to work in late October but the pain persisted for more than a year.
After a comeback to athletics in 1951, he realised he had lost his explosive speed and retired from serious competition before he was 21.
After returning to somewhere near his best health, he spent most of his working life in sales and marketing. For several years from 1989 he had one of Australia’s largest general agencies for AMP.
In 1953, he moved to Sydney, where he lived for 40 years, and in 2002 he settled on the Gold Coast, where he remains to this day.
All of his success on the athletic track was done without a coach. David just read some books on sprinting and picked the brain of top sprinters such as Treloar.
Still very active, both mentally and physically, the 85-year-old is a big Usain Bolt fan. “He is out of this world and so far ahead of everyone else,” he said. “He makes sprinting look so easy.”
He hopes the world champion will reconsider his decision not to compete at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast next April. “To have Usain here would be something to remember for a long time.”
