Allan Wells (left) on his way to winning the 1980 Olympic 100m title (© AFP / Getty Images)
It was entirely fitting, if not exactly helpful, that Allan Wells was an outsider when he powered his way to Olympic glory in Moscow.
Despite having clocked the fastest times in the second round and semifinal of the men’s 100m at those 1980 Games, the marine engineer from Edinburgh found himself drawn in the outside lane for the final.
“It was a big shock,” confessed Wells, who clocked a British record of 10.11 in round two. “The Russians used a computer. It must have been a Mickey Mouse one. It did set me back a bit.”
Still, after getting to his mark out wide in lane eight, Wells proceeded to complete his fairytale journey from obscurity to the very top of the global sprinting game.
The blue spikes that he wore that day now stand in the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA) as a reminder of the improbable triumph of the blacksmith’s son from the south side of Scotland’s capital city who only took up sprinting four years previously to improve his speed for the long jump.
Allan Wipper Wells, to use his distinctive full name, was 24 when he started training with a group of sprinters who competed as ‘professionals’ in handicapped races on the annual Scottish Games circuit.
That summer he finished fifth in the 100m final at the British trials for the 1976 Olympic Games. His time was 10.82. Steve Green won in 10.71. The British selectors decided to travel to Montreal without a representative in the men’s 100m.
Four years later, Wells hauled British sprinting from the depths of despair to the peak of Mount Olympus with a run that reflected his potent combination of speed, power and indomitable determination.
At the age of 28, he had only been using starting blocks for 12 weeks, following an IAAF rule stipulating their use in sprint events at major championships
‘Getting the dip just right’
The rustiness was clear to see as Wells climbed out of his blocks almost a step behind the Cuban drawn directly inside him, Osvaldo Lara. Wells’ reaction time was a leaden 0.193.
It took him 30 metres to catch Lara, and at that stage the Cuban’s teammate Silvio Leonard was leading the field in lane one.
As the race unfolded, it came down to a straight fight between two men separated by the width of the track: the featherweight figure of Leonard on the inside and the Herculean Wells on the outside.
They appeared to flash across the line together. From where Margot Wells was positioned in the main stand, she didn’t think her charging husband had quite made it.
When the replay was shown on the big screen, however, the textbook timing of Allan’s lean for the line looked decisively golden.
Both men were attributed with a 10.25 clocking but the gold medal went to the Flying Scotsman.
“I thought I had got it but I wasn’t sure until I saw the replay,” said Wells. “Lane eight was the worst possible draw for me. I only saw Leonard in the last 20 metres.
“I knew then that I had to do something special to get it. I knew I had to finish strong and get the dip just right. If I’d been running next to Leonard, I think I would have won by more. I knew I wanted to win it more than he did.”
Allan Wells in action at the 1980 Olympic Games (© Getty Images)
Lynn Davies, the British team manager in Moscow and long jump gold medallist at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, was one of the first to congratulate the new Olympic 100m champion.
After winning the Scottish U15 long jump title, Wells dreamed of following in the footsteps of ‘Lynn the Leap’ and plucked up the courage to chat to him when he spotted the Welshman training at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank Stadium – not while raking the pit for him at the 1970 Commonwealth Games, a commonly recited but apocryphal tale.
Wells made a couple of international appearances for Scotland as a long jumper and had a PB of 7.32m when he joined Wilson Young’s professional sprint group.
Quickly thriving on the gruelling gym work – notably the use of a speedball, a spring-loaded boxer’s punchball – and on prolonged sessions of plyometric work in his local park, Wells turned his attention to sprinting instead.
His big breakthrough came just two years later. At the 1978 Gateshead Games, Wells equalled Peter Radford’s 20-year-old British 100m record of 10.29 and claimed a trio of world-class scalps: Jamaica’s Olympic 200m champion Don Quarrie, Guyana’s Pan American 200m champion James Gilkes and top US sprinter James Sanford.
Six days later he won the UK title on his home track in Edinburgh in 10.15, another British record, and at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton the following month he won the 200m and finished a narrow second to Quarrie in the 100m, clocking wind-assisted times of 20.12 and 10.07.
Margot was a fellow sprinter in the Scottish team at those Games, reaching the semifinals of the 100m and 200m, but concentrated on helping her husband thereafter – as a training partner, coach and motivator-in-chief.
The rewards for their joint toil came in Moscow with gold from the 100m and silver from a tight 200m battle with the Italian Pietro Mennea.
The US boycott doubtless weakened the fields in both events but Wells proved a point in one of his first races as Olympic champion, beating the leading lights from across the Atlantic, Stanley Floyd (10.21) and Mel Lattanay (10.25) in 10.19 in Cologne.
For good measure, Allan Wipper Wells whipped his starred and striped rivals again in a trailblazing follow-up season, winning the IAAF Golden Sprints in Berlin and the 100m at the World Cup in Rome in 1981.
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage
