The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop
Posted Monday, 27 June, 2011
Have you ever heard of John Tarrant? The chances are that you haven’t. And yet his story is one of the most moving, engrossing, and ultimately tragic, tales in the history of athletics.
As a listless, bored teenager in post-war Buxton, Tarrant had taken up amateur boxing and been paid £17 expenses for a handful of bloodily disastrous fights. By nineteen, he had had enough and had instead taken to the Derbyshire fells with a stopwatch, fancying that he had the stamina and bloody-mindedness to succeed as a runner.
Satisfied of his potential, he applied to join a running club, naively declaring his boxing expenses as he did so. The result was an instantaneous lifetime ban from all domestic and international competition. According to the draconian codes which prevailed -- drawn up by an earlier Edwardian Oxbridge elite -- Tarrant had competed for money and hence there could be no way back for him.
But for Tarrant there was always a way, and in 1956 he found it. On a hot August day in Liverpool, he jumped from the crowd into a field of high-profile international marathon runners. He led for more than 20 miles, and then disappeared. The following day, every national newspaper carried the story, with the Daily Express coining the nickname which would become his abiding alter ego: the ghost runner.
For the next two years, Tarrant gate crashed races all over the UK, always running without a number, often arriving at races in disguise on the back of his brother's motorcycle, pursued by stewards clutching his photograph.
Thwarted by the nightmare of his ban, he ran at ever-longer distances, setting the world record at 40 miles and then 100 miles. He fled to the USA and then South Africa, where he ran as the only white in all-black road races -- "a ghost in a nation of ghosts" -- before cancer finally claimed him in 1975. He was aged just 42, and he died unfulfilled and largely unknown.
Tarrant ran up to 5,000 miles a year, always hoping he might prevail against the system. In the kitchen of their Hereford council flat, his wife counted the pennies. Out on the road, Tarrant merely totted up the miles. Always the outsider, even where history was concerned. And yet, within a decade or so of his death, men no better than him were earning millions.
Tarrant's widow still lives in the same first-floor Hereford council flat she shared with the legendary ghost. Around her are the cups and medals of this intriguing lost legend.
In The Ghost Runner, Bill Jones recounts a tale that will haunt you. You will wonder how it can be that you have never heard the name John Tarrant. Until now.
