Delany is the only Irishman to win an Olympic gold on the track. He was also a star at Villanova in the 50s and they haven't forgotten him there either. There's a nice article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.
A 21-year-old economics undergraduate at Villanova, Delany became the last Irish athlete to win an Olympic track-and-field gold medal. Fifty years ago today, he captured the 1,500 meters on a warm, sunny afternoon at the Melbourne Games.
To put his achievement into context, he was competing in the most keenly contested event in the Olympic program during a golden age for middle-distance running.
Only two years earlier, England's Roger Bannister had achieved what many thought was impossible: the first sub-four-minute mile. And as a measure of how far the event had progressed by June 1956, Delany had become the seventh man to dip below that magic barrier at a meet in Compton, Calif.
