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OPUS • Issue 6 • Spring 2012
Portsmouth Grammar School • www.pgs.org.uk
Athletic Support
helped me along the way. I remember being nervous, but concentrating on a good start on the grass track. I was used to running on the Hilsea grass and for our County Championships, we also had a wonderful grass track in Southampton. I got out of the blocks first and ran scared all the way waiting for the Yorkshire flash to pass me—but there was the tape! I looked around and to my huge surprise, and great joy, I had won! So this was an unexpected feeling of achievement and payback for all the nights of gloomy, wet, winter training, sometimes completely alone, while my PGS friends found time for leisure activities of various sorts.
Former international sprinter Richard Simonsen OP on how PGS helped him prepare for track success I sit here in Kuwait listening to BBC 2 on my computer while I contemplate the challenge Alasdair Akass has thrown to me - to provide some words from my distant past concerning the athlete’s perspective on competition and its many sides. I take on this task with great pleasure as it will let me reminisce about my time at Portsmouth Grammar School where I was given the wonderful opportunity to develop whatever natural-born talent I was lucky enough to possess, and to parlay it, along with my PGS education and experiences, into a university education in the United States and a career in dentistry that now has taken me around the world and to the Middle East, to spend the last few years of my time in the profession helping to build up a new university in a politically-fascinating part of the world. You never cease learning and growing! But I get ahead of myself! I was fortunate that my mother returned to her native land and home town after being evacuated on a ship from Liverpool at the outbreak of World War II when Portsmouth was being heavily bombed by the German Luftwaffe. At 14 years of age, my mum was sent across the Atlantic in a convoy from Liverpool, dodging bombs in the harbour, and U-boats on the open sea, and landed in Montreal, before the trip ended in the state of Maryland, where she stayed with
a wonderful host family until at 17, she was old enough to join the WAAFs. She returned again in a convoy of ships, and later in the war met and married my dad who was Norwegian and serving in the Royal Norwegian Air Force (Norway being occupied, the RNAF was stationed in England). I was born in Portsmouth and I commenced my education at Portsmouth Grammar School in 1953, when I joined the Lower School and started running.
Then, because of my dual nationality, I had to choose between running for England (having already represented England Schoolboys) and Norway, the land of my father’s birth.
I started competitive running because in the playground I always seemed to be able to catch, or run away from, everyone else. A book prize that I won for “Athletics”, signed by the late Hugh Woodcock, our young headmaster at the time, recently surfaced at home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and reminded me of the positive reinforcement we were given at PGS in areas of achievement. I remember how I treasured that book, and another I won for reading. Not bad for a consistent D- or C-stream boy I thought!
Richard Simonsen 1959
I was thus able to take advantage of my speed to run for my House (Nicol, then Hawkey and Smith) in school Sports Days throughout my time at PGS (1953-1964). Encouraged by sports teachers like Messrs. Hopkinson and Stoneham, I was able to progress through city, county and AllEngland championships.
Since the Norwegian Athletics Federation needed a marginally fast young sprinter more than the British team, my chances of being picked for the Norwegian team over the coming years were greater and I chose to compete for Norway. I did so for ten years (1963-1973) running the sprint distances and relays on their national team, while I was attending university in the United States (1964-1971) and also competing for the University of Minnesota.
The pressure? I can’t recall much pressure from my PGS times, but as I began to represent Norway, I certainly do recall times and places where, in international events against other countries, standing on the starting line, I was so nervous as to wish I could be anywhere else in the world but occupying this particular spot in place and time.
Then, after completing perhaps the 400 metres, I also vividly remember the distinct pain, short-term but very uncomfortable, from the build up of lactic acid in my legs.
Again, as with the nervousness, nothing could assuage the feeling but time. Although I certainly aspired to, I never reached the towering heights of Roger Black’s achievements. Roger, who was to come to PGS some years after me and gain national and international recognition for his Olympic and other feats was a true phenomenon. Had my school records not been erased by the switch from yards to metres, they surely would have been by Roger! But I think it is safe to say that the foundation for our mutual love for running and the successes we each in our own way shared, was laid in our days at Portsmouth Grammar School. Ingrained with a sense of fairness and doing one’s very best, we both left the school to take advantage of the opportunity our time at PGS had offered us. I am forever thankful for those years that, for me anyway, were unappreciated at the time of youthful naiveté, as I knew nothing different. I know now that these were precious years of development, that have let me enjoy a wonderful career and a happy life, imbued, I would hope, with the English sense of the pursuit of excellence as documented in the wonderful film, Chariots of Fire. Richard Simonsen OP (1953-1964)
Thus the background for Mr. Akass’ challenge. What can I relate to you readers regarding the “feel” of competition - the pressure, the excitement, the highs, the lows? My first memory of a real high in athletics (apart from the thorough enjoyment I had at each Sports Day from various local successes) was winning the All-England Championships in the 100 yards the first time. Why such a strong memory? Because it was so unexpected. I was not the favourite. I remember he, the favourite, was a young lad from Yorkshire whose name escapes me [strangely, as I have read this through several times while writing, the name seems to return to my memory and unless I am mistaken it was Richard Williams]. But although the name is blurry, I can see his face now, almost 50 years later. I was representing my school, my city, and my county, so on the starting line I had the expectations of many people who had
In 1963, Chris Stoneham took Richard to London to compete for PGS in the London Athletic Club Challenge meeting. Richard returned with three silver cups for winning the 100 yards, the 440 yards and for best performance of the meeting. The cups are engraved with the winners’ names and then returned to LAC after one year.
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