The Legend Dick Emberger ’60 By Jenny Kincaid Boone ’01
un through the tape. Roanoke College Coach C. Homer Bast delivered that mantra to his track athletes regularly. Dick Emberger ’60 could hear it when he beat his opponent by less than a second in the U.S. Olympic Trials in Los Angeles in 1964. The two were almost neck and neck nearing the finish line of the 1,500-meter race. Emberger broke the tape first. “If you’ve got anything left, you do it now,” Emberger says he remembers thinking as he recalled his former coach’s words. “You run as hard as you can to get to the finish line.” Emberger went on to finish 10th in the decathlon in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, making history as the first Roanoke College athlete to compete in the Olympic Games.
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Roanoke College Magazine