Yvonne Murray-Mooney donates her 1993 spikes to World Athletics President Sebastian Coe for the MOWA (© MOWA)
Good news for the 11 women who followed Yvonne Murray home in the women’s 3000m final at the 1993 World Athletics Indoor Championships. They can now get a close-up view of the clean pair of heels the Flying Scot showed them in Toronto 31 years ago.
Mrs Murray-Mooney MBE, as the always gutsy British runner has become, has kindly donated the running spikes that took her to world indoor gold that day to the glittering array of track and field artefacts on display in the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA).
The shoes have the personal touch of the initials ‘YM’ and the number ‘3000’ stitched on the outer side of each heel.
For the final 10 circuits of the SkyDome’s tight 200m indoor track, YM’s nominal 3000m rivals had to make do with a disappearing view of them.
At the 1000m mark, Murray made her move. Covering the next 800m in 2:13.9, she sailed into the far blue yonder. With two laps to go, she was 100m clear.
Crossing the line in 8:50.55, Murray had plenty of time to savour her global success. The second woman home, Romania’s Margareta Keszeg, clocked 9:02.89.
The 12.34 gap – more of a chasm – remains the record winning margin in the history of the event.
The US runner Lynn Jennings, a three-time world cross country champion and 10,000m bronze medallist at the Olympic Games in Barcelona the previous year, finished third in 9:03.78.
Elly van Hulst of the Netherlands, world record-holder in the event, was another notable ‘also ran’, sixth in 9:08.33.
Yvonne Murray celebrates her 3000m win at the 1993 World Athletics Indoor Championships (© Getty Images / Allsport)
“Tommy helped persuade me to carry on”
For Murray, the tour de force nature of her performance made victory all the sweeter.
Six years earlier, after breaking the field in similar fashion to lift the European indoor 3000m title in Lievin, she had tried to win the 1987 world indoor final in the same manner in Indianapolis but she wound up a well-beaten fifth.
Fresher in her mind were the dramatic final lap fades from first to eighth in the 1992 Olympic 3000m final, and from first to 10th at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo.
After leaving the rest of the world on the suffering end in Toronto, the 28-year-old confessed she had considered hanging up her YM spikes in the wake of her Olympic capitulation in Barcelona; she had led with 300m remaining, but finished 10.19 behind the victorious Russian Yelena Romanova.
“This win is for my coach, Tommy Boyle,” Murray proclaimed. “There was an awful lot of soul-searching after Barcelona and, along with my family, Tommy helped persuade me to carry on.
“It would have been so easy for him to throw in the towel as far as I was concerned but he didn’t and I will always remember that.
“It is a mark of how good he is that he helped persuade me to carry on after two really trying years.”
It was a mark of how good a coach Boyle happened to be that – aided and abetted by his sprint guru assistant, Stuart Hogg – he guided another Scottish athlete to world indoor gold in Toronto, Tom McKean bouncing back from similar setbacks on the global stage to win the world indoor men’s 800m title.
Murray was six years into her international career when she moved to Motherwell, near Glasgow, with her future husband Tom Mooney in 1987, to join Boyle’s training group.
A native of Musselburgh, five miles east of Edinburgh, she was only 16 when she ran for Scotland in the senior women’s 4.4km race at the 1981 World Athletics Cross Country Championships in Madrid.
She finished 79th, 93 seconds behind the victorious Grete Waitz in a race that also included Ingrid Kristiansen (16th) and Rosa Mota (17th), two other all-time greats of women’s distance running.
Murray was still a pupil at Musselburgh Grammar School when she travelled, with textbooks in her luggage, to the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. On her 18th birthday she finished 10th in the 3000m final.
"I was instructed by Meg Ritchie on no account to utter a word to anyone that she was my PE teacher,” she told Doug Gillon in an interview in The Herald.
“Meg won the discus in Brisbane. The memory of her standing on the winner's rostrum, with the gold medal round her neck and Scotland the Brave playing, really inspired me."
Four years later, at 21, Murray had Commonwealth gold in her sights on her hometown track when she hit the front with 150m to go in the 3000m final. Despite the roars of the Edinburgh crowd, however, she had to settle for bronze behind Canadians Lynn Williams and Debbie Bowker at Meadowbank Stadium.
Two weeks later, Murray outsprinted her Great Britain teammate Zola Budd for European 3000m bronze in Stuttgart, clocking a Scottish record 8:37.15 behind Russia’s Olga Bondarenko and Olympic champion Maricica Puica of Romania.
Yvonne Murray-Mooney with world indoor gold medals from 1993 and 2024 (© Mark Gibson)
“Mum” is number one
In the broad sweep of her career, Murray neatly claimed a full set of medals at the Commonwealth Games – adding 3000m silver in Auckland in 1990 and 10,000m gold in Victoria in 1994 – and at the European Championships, with 3000m gold in Split in 1990 and silver at the same distance in Helsinki in 1994.
She also won 3000m gold, silver and bronze at the European Indoor Championships.
At global level outdoors, her finest achievement was third place in the 1988 Olympic 3000m final in Seoul, behind the Ukrainian Soviet Tatyana Samolenko and Romania’s Paula Ivan.
She also won World Cup 3000m races in Barcelona in 1989 and in London in 1994.
Reflecting on her long, distinguished international career, the much bemedalled Murray-Mooney was asked by Gillon which title she treasured the most.
“That’s easy,” she replied. “Mum.”
Laura Mooney proudly wore her famous mum’s Commonwealth 10,000m gold medal when she ran in the Queen’s Baton Relay ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
View Murray’s spikes in glorious 3D in the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA).
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics
