Filbert and Anna Bayi with Ron Davis at the Bayi Multi Sports Complex in Tanzania
World Athletics is deeply saddened to hear that renowned coach and sports developer Ron Davis, who guided athletes including Olympic medallist and world record-breaker Filbert Bayi during his highly accomplished career, has died at the age of 81.
Davis dedicated much of his life to promoting athletics in several countries, particularly in Africa, and died in Tanzania on Friday (22).
The US athlete-turned-coach was born in 1941 in New York City and began his own sporting career as a basketball and baseball player. With the training field for the high school baseball team too far away for him to attend daily practice, he turned to athletics and soon found his talent for running.
Davis received dozens of university scholarship offers and joined San Jose State University in California where he became an All-American, forming a key part of the history-making 1962 NCAA Cross-Country Championships team—the first racially integrated team to win the division one (then called the university division) title.
A steeplechase specialist, Davis went on to qualify for the US Olympic trials in 1964 before starting his career as a coach.
It was in the early 1960s that his connection with Africa began. During the height of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, Davis embarked on a goodwill tour around Africa as part of the US team. He would later go on to coach in countries including Nigeria, Mauritius, Tanzania, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Mozambique and Congo.
He became the national athletics coach for Tanzania in 1979, with Bayi the nation’s star athlete. The following year Davis guided Bayi to Olympic 3000m steeplechase silver at the Moscow Games – Tanzania’s first ever Olympic medal.
“Ron Davis is a hero to me because of [my] silver medal while he was coaching me,” Bayi said in a 2019 interview with SpeedEndurance.com. “I’ll never forget that. I went through ups and downs with him and we are still friends.”
Davis went on to launch and direct the LaGrange pre-Olympic training camp ‘I Train in LaGrange’, which welcomed more than 500 athletes from 45 countries – many from Africa – before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
He continued to work as a sports developer and in 2018 Bayi invited Davis back to Tanzania where they created ‘2020 and Beyond’, a programme designed to scout, train, nurture and prepare talented athletes.
“I will be forever grateful to Filbert Bayi for bringing me back home,” Davis said in a 2020 interview. “I have always dreamed of spending the rest of my life in Tanzania.”
Bayi reinforced that wish. "Ron badly needed to live and die in Africa, especially Tanzania,” he said. “I have given him space in my house compound near where I buried my wife. I want to treat him as my coach, brother, mentor and part of my family."
A recent achievement for the pair came last December when they helped 800m runner Regina Mpigachai to become the first student athlete from the Filbert Bayi Foundation to gain a US scholarship for the University of Northern Colorado.
Another dream come true for Davis was seeing Bayi’s recently completed biography, to which he played a major role in gathering information and photographs. Davis did not want Bayi’s story to be forgotten and hoped that it would serve as an inspiration for athletics generations to come.
World Athletics
