It’s hard to get Amy Winehouse, Roger Bannister and Seth O’Donnell into the same story. Please bear with me as I give it a red-hot go. It’s a long bow but I think I might be able to bend it.
The Victorian Milers Club is in its twentieth year. Meeting five of the 2024-25 season was the ninety-sixth in club history. Next season will bring no.100. Your correspondent has been involved from the start as have most of the other members of the committee. Latterly, my role has been manual timekeeper, back-up in case the photo finish timing malfunctions. “Break glass in case of emergency” sort of thing.
Thursday 13 March 2025 brought the sound of shattering glass. Our March meeting is usually held at the Doncaster track because, with the approach of the autumn equinox, we need good lighting. Outside Lakeside, the Doncaster lighting is as good as anything around. It gets darker earlier in March than in December and January. The men’s 1500 metres A race around 9:30pm started in complete darkness.
Minutes later, as Seth O’Donnell led into the straight with 500 metres to go – and here’s where the Amy Winehouse reference comes in – the lights cut out. It was . . .
Back to black . . .
I’ve been at meetings when the sky turns black. Most vivid in my memory is was the ferocious thunderstorm which broke as the men’s race at the Bathurst23 world cross-country finished. We knew that was coming, however, as the skies grew ominously darker by the minute and the wind picked up to gale force.
Likewise the summer storm which descended on the world track and field championships in Helsinki in 2005. Even though dense, dark, rain-heavy clouds could be seen building up over several hours the breaking of that storm came with a downpour as sudden and heavy as if someone had upended a dumpster of cold water directly above our heads in the media seats (don’t let anyone tell you journalists always get the best seats in the house).
Again, a Milers Club meeting some years ago was interrupted a storm, accompanied by a spectacular lightning display, dumping enough water in a short enough time to turn Lakeside Stadium briefly into Lake Stadium.
The sudden absence of the floodlights is something else again. At Doncaster it went from brilliant light to total dark in an instant. I don’t know how the competitors kept running. Seth O’Donnell had just blown the race open but almost the entire field were either in the straight or about to enter it. Maybe that helped. Cool heads did too. The track lighting had gone down but there was some ambient light and a quick plea by the announcer brought scores of spectators onto the outside lanes holding their phone lights aloft.
Amazingly, there was also sufficient light for the livestream to keep transmitting a viable picture. That showed O’Donnell producing a 56-57 final lap to race to victory in a hand-timed 3:36.8, smashing a Milers Club record that had been held by Louis Rowan since December 2005, our second-ever meeting. Then, it got Rowan a Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games qualifying time and, ultimately, a place in the team. O’Donnell’s performance earned him a $2000 bonus on top of his $1000 winner’s prizemoney.
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Behind O’Donnell, Lucas Chis, just over three months short of 17, ran 3:42.1, and Charles Barrett, two months shy of 18, 3:42.9. Leave out Cameron Myers and these are times that should have middle-distance fans raving.
. . . . and Bannister?
The Bannister connection is personal. Not that I ever saw the great man, much less knew him. Instead, it relates to another man who is in almost every picture of the finish of the first sub-four-minute mile. One of the timekeepers, he was, crouched right on the finish line, the bell he had rung to signal the last lap at his feet. Pipe clenched between his teeth, our timekeeper looks imperturbable even as history is about to be made according to which side of the four-minute mark his watch will stop,
The image of that man flashed through my mind as I waited on Seth O’Donnell. As spectators rushed to the edge of the track to cheer O’Donnell home I had to crouch down on one knee and lean forward to get a line of sight. Once he crossed the line, everything was fine, the other runners following one by one. The occasion may have been nowhere near as significant as 6 May 1954, but I imagine the feeling, “I don’t want to stuff this up”, must have been the same.
Back from black . . . .
For our last meeting of the season the Milers Club had introduced the concept of a final. The runners – eight in the 800s, 12 in the 1500s – were invited on times run in our earlier meetings to contest a final with prize money for the first four places. The two 800 finals were to follow the 1500s.
What to do? Small groups huddled around canvassing every option we could think of. Our best information on the lights was that they would not come back on as they were set to operate automatically. Gradually, the realisation hit us that we would have to abandon the 800s and hope to re-schedule them (assuming a suitable date could be found).
Of course, no sooner had this announcement been made than the lights did pop back on. The runners all agreed to race. The 800 finals went ahead.
Back from black. Dark night became day. Undaunted by the defeat of the lighting automatons the infield sprinklers now turned themselves on. And no-one knew the code to turn them off. Humans v machines: an entertaining 1-1 draw with echoes of Winehouse and Bannister – and a dash of O’Donnell.
