PETERS NOT TO RUN IN BERNE

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27425, 11 August 1954, Page 14

PETERS NOT TO RUN IN BERNE

EFFECT OF COLLAPSE AT VANCOUVER

BRITISH PRESS COMMENT ON RACE

(Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, August 9. Jim Peters, - the British marathon champion, who collapsed dramatically in the Empire Games event at Vancouver on Saturday when 200 yards from-the tape, will not run in the marathon for Britain in the European championships at Berne, Switzerland, at the end of the month.

The British Amateur Athletic Board made the announcement today as the result of information received from Vancouver. The withdrawal is also at Peters’s request. Some of London’s newspapers have given front-page prominence to messages from their special sports writers at the Empire Games querying whether such scenes as were witnessed during the final stages of Peters’s marathon race could do sport anything but harm. All express in strong terms their hope that never again will it be possible for such torture, drama, and tragedy as they variously describe it, to be witnessed by a sporting audience.

In the “Daily Express” Frank Rostron says: “I have seen personally and experienced some sickeningly gory injuries in the boxing ring. ’I have seen piteously exhausted marathon runners go delirious on the course and qualify for a strait-jacket. But I cannot recall anything quite so shocking as the spectacle poor, semi-con-scious Peters was allowed to make for 19 minuites of agony in the Empire Games marathon.

Peter Wilson, in the “Daily Mirror,” says: “Sport can be heroic or routine. You can thrill to it, or yawn through it. but it should never revolt you, make you squirm, force you to close your eyes and feel dirty and ashamed, as though you had paid a black market price to be a privileged spectator at a public execution.

“If you think I exaggerate, I can only say that more than a score of women fainted at the dreadful sight of three-parts unconscious Peters staggering and falling, staggering and falling, getting up, crawling, pawing the air and stumbling blindly like some maimed animal as he tried to reach the tape. “Red Cross men carried the women out on stretchers. Thousands of other women averted their eyes. Strong men either bit their lips or screamed to get a doctor. I never want to see such human torture again. “That was how I felt at one of the most gut-wrenching spectacles I have ever had to sit through—the end of Peters’s marathon race, which had women fainting on the stands, children sobbing and hiding their eyes, and tough men wanting to be sick.”