[i’M STUNNED. THE GREAT BRITISH ATHLETICS WRITER JOHN RODDA HAS DIED. HE WAS A GREAT FELLOW, A LOVING FAMILY MAN, AN EXCELLENT WORDSMITH AND A MAN WHO RESPECTED THE SPORT OF ATHLETICS AND WAS ALWAYS KEEN TO LISTEN TO ANYONE WHO COULD FURTHER HIS KNOWLEDGE ON THE PERFORMANCE LEVEL OF THE SPORT. HE’S ONE OF THE REAL OLD SCHOOL GENTLEMEN OF THE TRACK. HE’D BEEN RETIRED FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS, BUT HE WAS THE SORT OF CHARACTER YOU COULDN’T FORGET. I SPENT QUITE A BIT OF TIME WITH HIM WHEN WE WERE AT THE 85 EUROPEAN CUP IN MOSCOW, WATCHING KIDS LIKE ZOLA BUDD AND LINFORD CHRISTIE EMERGING. RODDA HAD A VENEER OF ALOOFNESS, BUT ONCE YOU CRACKED THAT HE WAS A LOVELY FELLOW. THIS IS A SAD DAY - KK]
Coe leads tributes to John Rodda, doyen of athletics correspondents
• Guardian reporter has died aged 78 after long illness
• ‘Great sadness that John won’t see the 2012 Games’ says Coe
The Guardian, Wednesday 4 March 2009
Article history
Lord Sebastian Coe led the tributes last night to the former Guardian athletics correspondent John Rodda, who has died after a long illness. Rodda covered nine Olympic Games for the Guardian from 1960-1992 and was unrivalled in the field for his knowledge of athletics and sports politics. He was 78.
Rodda wrote a history of the Olympic Games with Lord Killanin, the president of the International Olympic Committee from 1972-80, and was a member of the IOC press commission, on which he served for 18 years.
“It’s a great sadness that John won’t be there to see the 2012 Games,” said Coe, a former Olympic gold medallist who is chairman of the London 2012 organising committee.
"He will be there in spirit … but we won’t have the pleasure of seeing him, peering at us over those glasses.
"He was, quite simply, the doyen of athletics writers. I first met him when I was 18 at a junior northern squad meeting. The thing about John was that he absolutely loved athletics. He had an absolute passion for it. We also shared a love of boxing – he was a great boxing writer, too – and from that moment we shared many great conversations about the two sports.
"He was also very influential on the International Olympic Committee, very close to Lord Killanin, and he was one of the people who opened that world up to me. I was the first athlete to address the IOC and he was very helpful to me in that. When the sports minister, Neil Macfarlane, asked me in 1984 to chair a commission on how we could improve our Olympic performance, I agreed on the basis that I could have whoever I wanted on the panel. John was the first person I asked to join me.
“In 1985 the report was due in and John and I were still working furiously on drafts three hours before I was due to run in the Golden Mile in Oslo. I left him tapping away and went to race. Steve Cram ran a 1500 metres from another planet and took my world record and John reported my demise with a pure professionalism, not mentioning what we had been up to hours earlier.”
Cram paid tribute to Rodda’s approach to his job. “John was one of the elder statesman of athletics journalism,” he said.
“He very much typified the old tradition of values and respect when it came to those he wrote about. An incredibly knowledgeable man who was very much respected by his peers and athletes alike as well as a real gent. However, John was never frightened to ask the difficult questions. I’ll remember fondly the days in the mid-eighties when, as athletes, we could enjoy the company of journalists, and John was certainly one of those.”
In 1988 Rodda won the British sports journalism award for sports reporter of the year.
Alan Pascoe, a 4x400m silver medallist at the 1972 Olympics, recalled the depth of Rodda’s knowledge. “John was a consummate sports journalist who had as deep a knowledge of athletics and sports politics as anyone I’ve ever met,” Pascoe said.
“In the days when athletes had a group of journalists who travelled everywhere with the British team, John was always there with us and was always a genuine help, often telling us information about opponents we knew little about.”
Rodda’s personable manner was also recalled by Ron Hill, a former world record holder over 25km.
“John was a great man,” he said. “I remember him buying me a pint of Guinness after the marathon at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. I was very thirsty after that run and I thought it a very nice gesture. That sums up the camaraderie of those days, you don’t get that any more between athletes and journalists. He represents a long gone era that I regret has passed. He was to my mind one of the great writers on athletics. We don’t have his like around these days.”
Brendan Foster, an Olympic bronze medallist in 1976 and now a BBC commentator, said Rodda would be “sadly missed”.
“I thought he was a great journalist who had a deep knowledge of athletics, in particular the Olympics. He was always fair and impartial, and brought the understanding of our sport to a generation of readers.”