Tom Courtney, a Fordham University graduate who with a homestretch surge and a lunge on the tape won the furious 800-meter run by inches at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, earning the gold medal for the United States, died in Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Naples, Fla. He is 90 years old.
The cause was amyloidosis, his son Tom Jr. said.
Courtney, a 23-year-old Army private at the time, was not the favorite going into the 1956 Games; that distinction belongs to a fellow American, Arnie Sowella senior at the University of Pittsburgh who beat Courtney repeatedly throughout their college careers, though Courtney had her own victories at Fordham.
But if Sowell is faster, Courtney, at 6 feet 2 inches and 179 pounds, is recognized as the stronger of the two. Both made the United States Olympic team and advanced to the eight-man 800-meter final.
When the moment came, however, on a narrow, spongy dirt track, Courtney was shocked.
“As I stepped onto the track,” he once wrote, “I felt the rubber on my legs. I saw over a hundred thousand people in the stands, and before I knew it I had collapsed onto the infield grass. ‘Could it be,’ I remember thinking, as I lay there looking up at the sky, ‘that I’m so nervous I can’t run?’
“Then I realized how ridiculous I was, lying flat on the grass as they started the race. I think I lost my nervousness at the humor of that image. I recovered, got up and jogged to the starting line.”
In the final turn of the two-lap race, Sowell took the lead and Courtney was second. Sowell then began to sprint, followed by Courtney, who swung to the outside. He caught Sowell at the turn and passed him. But coming up behind, Britain’s Derek Johnson was also making waves, and with 40 meters to go he snuck between the two Americans and looked set to win.
“It was a new kind of agony for me,” Courtney said of the moment in a 2001 interview with Runner’s World magazine. “My head was exploding, my stomach was torn. Even the tips of my fingers were it hurt. All I could think was, ‘If I live, I’ll never run again.’ I felt like everything was lost, but then I looked at the tape and realized this is the only chance I’ll ever have.”
Courtney caught Johnson in the final strides and threw himself to the tape, winning the gold medal by a tenth of a second, in 1 minute 47.7 seconds. (The record at the time, set in 1955, was 1:46.6. The current record, set in 2012 by David Rudisha of Kenya, is 1:40.91.)
Courtney crashed after the finish, and when she arrived, she asked Johnson, “Who won?”
“You did,” said the Englishman.
Courtney and Johnson were so exhausted that the medal ceremony was delayed by an hour. Courtney remembered this. “As I listen to the national anthem,” he said, “all I can think about is how thankful I am that the year is right and the day is right and I’m right.”
Five days after that race, Courtney won a second gold medal by anchoring the United States to victory in the 4×400-meter relay.
Thomas William Courtney was born on August 17, 1933, in South Orange, NJ, and he grew up near Livingston. His father, Jim, played baseball for the Newark Bears, the top minor league team of the New York Yankees, before becoming a railroad worker. His wife, Dolores (Goerdes) Courtney, was a housewife born into a German-speaking family.
Tom initially played baseball at Livingston High School, gave it up for tennis and then took up the pole vault. After the track coach tried her in the half mile, Courtney became a state champion a year later.
Entering Fordham, he anchored his team to a world record in the two-mile relay in 1954. In college and afterward, he won national titles every year from 1954 to 1958. Only in 1957 did he set a world record which is 1:46.8 for 880 yards outdoors and equals the world record of 1:09.5 for 600 yards indoors. In May 1955, he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated running in his Fordham reds.
That spring, Courtney graduated from Fordham with a bachelor’s degree, and that summer, she competed in track meets in Europe. In Germany, he searches for the family home of Rudolf Harbig, a German track athlete of the 1930s who was killed in World War II. He found Harbig’s mother there and demanded to see her son’s training notebooks. Able to read German thanks to her own mother, Courtney got a valuable tip: Harbig practiced running downhill to increase her speed.
Courtney adopted the method. He later credited this as a key factor in his ability to defeat Sowell and win Olympic gold.
Drafted into the Army after his college graduation, Courtney was allowed to spend his time on active duty focusing on track. He was honorably discharged in 1957.
He earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard in 1959. In later years he worked as an investor in companies in New York, Boston and Pittsburgh. He married Posy L’Hommedieu in 1963.
In addition to Tom Jr., he is survived by his wife; a brother, Kevin; two other sons, Peter and Frank; and nine grandchildren. He had a home in Sewickley, Pa., from 1975 until his death, and in 1993 he began dividing his time between Sewickley and Naples.
When Courtney ended her running career at age 25, she vowed to run a sub-5-minute mile every year. He accomplished this on his 50th birthday, when he ran a 4:36 mile against high schools in Sewickley. Then he stopped, saying, “I have done enough.”
In an interview for this obituary in 2013, he recalled that last mile:
“After the first lap, the coach told his kids, ‘Don’t let that old man beat you.’ After the second lap, he said, ‘Don’t let that old man catch you.’ After the third lap, the coach yelled, ‘Catch that old man!’”
Frank Litsky, a longtime Times sportswriter, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting.
